Hearing the Maximum Entropy Potential of neuronal networks

Abstract

We consider a spike-generating stationary Markov process whose transition probabilities are known. We show that there is a canonical potential whose Gibbs distribution, obtained from the Maximum Entropy Principle (MaxEnt), is the equilibrium distribution of this process. We provide a method to compute explicitly and exactly this potential as a linear combination of spatio-temporal interactions. In particular, our results establish an explicit relation between Maximum Entropy models and neuro-mimetic models used in spike train statistics.