Exact computation of the maximum-entropy potential of spiking neural-network models.

Understanding how stimuli and synaptic connectivity influence the statistics of spike patterns in neural networks is a central question in computational neuroscience. The maximum-entropy approach has been successfully used to characterize the statistical response of simultaneously recorded spiking neurons responding to stimuli. However, in spite of good performance in terms of prediction, the fitting parameters do not explain the underlying mechanistic causes of the observed correlations. On the other hand, mathematical models of spiking neurons (neuromimetic models) provide a probabilistic mapping between the stimulus, network architecture, and spike patterns in terms of conditional probabilities. In this paper we build an exact analytical mapping between neuromimetic and maximum-entropy models.