AUTHOR=Godin Camille , Thivierge J. P. 

TITLE=Maximum likelihood estimation of spatially dependent interactions in large populations of cortical neurons

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 19 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncom.2025.1639829

DOI=10.3389/fncom.2025.1639829

ISSN=1662-5188

ABSTRACT=Understanding how functional connectivity between cortical neurons varies with spatial distance is crucial for characterizing large-scale neural dynamics. However, inferring these spatial patterns is challenging when spike trains are collected from large populations of neurons. Here, we present a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) framework to quantify distance-dependent functional interactions directly from observed spiking activity. We validate this method using both synthetic spike trains generated from a linear Poisson model and biologically realistic simulations performed with Izhikevich neurons. We then apply the approach to large-scale electrophysiological recordings from V1 cortical neurons. Our results show that the proposed MLE approach robustly captures spatial decay in functional connectivity, providing insights into the spatial structure of population-level neural interactions.