MAT 319: Statistical Analysis of Neuronal Data

17 — 21 October 2005
  • Public Lecture by Dr Robert E. Kass (.pdf)
  • A review article (.pdf) forms the core material for MAT 319, "Statistical Analysis of Neuronal Data", by Drs Kass and Ventura.

    • Old Main 403 Canisius College: 5:00 — 8:00pm Daily

    Instructors:   Robert E. Kass & Valerie Ventura
    Department of Statistics and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
    Carnegie Mellon University
    Pittsburgh, PA 15213
    Email:     kass@stat.cmu.edu
    Email: vventura@stat.cmu.edu

    Course Outline: One of the most important techniques in learning about the functioning of the brain has involved examining neuronal activity in laboratory animals under varying experimental conditions. Neural information is represented and communicated through series of action potentials, or spike trains, and the central scientific issue in many studies concerns the physiological significance that should be attached to a particular neuron firing pattern in a particular part of the brain. In addition, a major relatively new effort in neurophysiology involves the use of multi-electrode recording, in which responses from dozens of neurons are recorded simultaneously.

    This course will cover fundamental topics in neuronal data analysis. Each evening will be split between lecture and a computer lab, where students will analyze data with supervision from the instructors and teaching assistant Jeffrey Liebner. The topics are drawn from the review article “Statistical Analysis of Neuronal Data,” by Kass, Ventura, and Brown, which will appear in the Journal of Neurophysiology in June of this year. See: http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~kass/papers.

    The basic program of study will be as follows:

    1. Overview of Neuronal Spike Train Data
      Exploratory Data Analysis
      t-Tests
      ANOVA
      Confidence Intervals Analysis in MATLAB
    2. Statistics: The Big Picture
      Maximum Likelihood
      Poisson Processes
    3. Regression and Smoothing Methods
      Estimation of the Firing-Rate Function
    4. The Bootstrap
      Inference About Multiple Firing-Rate Functions
    5. Bayes’ Theorem
      Bayesian Decoding
    Biographical Information: Robert E. Kass -- Dr Robert E. (Rob) Kass received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Chicago in 1980. His Ph.D. thesis and early work was on differential geometry in statistics; his book “Geometrical Foundations of Asymptotic Inference,” coauthored with Paul Vos, was published in 1997 by John Wiley and Sons. Most of Kass’s other statistical research has been in Bayesian inference. He served as the first Vice President of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis, and as Chair of the Section for Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association. He also served as Chair of the Statistics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1991 he began the series of workshops Case Studies in Bayesian Statistics, which are held at Carnegie Mellon every odd year, and was co-editor of the six proceedings volumes that were published by Springer. His major applied interests are neuroscience. He is co-organizer of the workshop series Statistical Analysis of Neuronal Data”, which began in 2002 and is held at Carnegie Mellon on even years.

    Kass has served on the editorial boards of the Annals of Statistics, Biometrika, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Statistics in Medicine. He was Executive Editor of Statistical Science 1992–1994 and is the founding editor-inchief of the new electronic journal Bayesian Analysis, which is scheduled to begin publication in 2005. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the 10 most highly cited researchers, 1993–2003, in the category of mathematics. See:
    http://in-cites.com/top/2004/second04-math.html.

    Kass has been on the faculty of the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon since 1981 and served as Department Head from 1995 to 2004. He joined the faculty of the joint Carnegie Mellon–University of Pittsburgh Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in 1997. He has also been an instructor in the Neuroinformatics summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, since 2002. 

    Biographical Information: Valerie Ventura -- Dr Valerie Ventura received her D.Phil. in Statistics from Oxford University (United Kingdom) in 1997. She has been on the faculty of the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon since 1997, and joined the faculty of the joint Carnegie Mellon–University of Pittsburgh Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in 1998. Ventura has also been an instructor in the Neuroinformatics summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, since 1998. Her research interests include the bootstrap and efficient intensive statistics, climatology and neuroscience.