Topic: effective interactions

In networks of neurons, fine-scale interactions build upon one another to produce large-scale patterns of activity. But inferring these interactions from state-of-the-art experiments poses a fundamental challenge: As the number of cells increases, the number of possible interactions quickly outpaces the number of available statistics. Thus, rather than inferring all interactions, one must focus on a sparse network. Here, we seek to identify the most informative network of effective interactions in large neuronal populations. We show that the optimal network -- in a precise information-theoreti