Topic: third-order correlations

We investigate the ability of the pairwise maximum entropy model to describe the spiking activity of large populations of neurons recorded from the visual, auditory, motor, and somatosensory cortices. To quantify this performance, we use (1) Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergences, (2) the extent to which the pairwise model predicts third-order correlations, and (3) its ability to predict the probability of multiple simultaneously active neurons. We compare these with the performance of a model with independent neurons and study the relationship between the different performance measures, while vary