Topic: fractional common cause inputs

The idea of estimating synaptic connectivity and strength from parallel spike trains has been entertained since the late 1960s, but the last few years have seen a resurgence in proposed methods. A majority of model-free techniques estimate synaptic coupling via a “separation of timescales” (SOT) principle applied to the cross-correlogram (CCG). That is, a joint distribution is implicitly specified on paired spike trains where it is common to include a fast timescale component (modeling synaptic coupling) and a coarse timescale component (modeling network effects). Such models provide insights