Noise-robust unsupervised spike sorting based on discriminative subspace learning with outlier handling

MR Keshtkaran, Z Yang - Journal of neural engineering, 2017 - iopscience.iop.org
Journal of neural engineering, 2017iopscience.iop.org
Objective. Spike sorting is a fundamental preprocessing step for many neuroscience studies
which rely on the analysis of spike trains. Most of the feature extraction and dimensionality
reduction techniques that have been used for spike sorting give a projection subspace
which is not necessarily the most discriminative one. Therefore, the clusters which appear
inherently separable in some discriminative subspace may overlap if projected using
conventional feature extraction approaches leading to a poor sorting accuracy especially …
Objective
Spike sorting is a fundamental preprocessing step for many neuroscience studies which rely on the analysis of spike trains. Most of the feature extraction and dimensionality reduction techniques that have been used for spike sorting give a projection subspace which is not necessarily the most discriminative one. Therefore, the clusters which appear inherently separable in some discriminative subspace may overlap if projected using conventional feature extraction approaches leading to a poor sorting accuracy especially when the noise level is high. In this paper, we propose a noise-robust and unsupervised spike sorting algorithm based on learning discriminative spike features for clustering.
Approach
The proposed algorithm uses discriminative subspace learning to extract low dimensional and most discriminative features from the spike waveforms and perform clustering with automatic detection of the number of the clusters. The core part of the algorithm involves iterative subspace selection using linear discriminant analysis and clustering using Gaussian mixture model with outlier detection. A statistical test in the discriminative subspace is proposed to automatically detect the number of the clusters.
Main results
Comparative results on publicly available simulated and real in vivo datasets demonstrate that our algorithm achieves substantially improved cluster distinction leading to higher sorting accuracy and more reliable detection of clusters which are highly overlapping and not detectable using conventional feature extraction techniques such as principal component analysis or wavelets.
Significance
By providing more accurate information about the activity of more number of individual neurons with high robustness to neural noise and outliers, the proposed unsupervised spike sorting algorithm facilitates more detailed and accurate analysis of single-and multi-unit activities in neuroscience and brain machine interface studies.
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