Detection of dependence between neurons and synchronization

patricia.bouret@gmail.com
Synchronization is an important phenomenon in neuroscience and some people think that this kind of dependency between neurons activities may play an important role in the neural code, that is how the brain codes information. But before entering this debate, there is another more mathematical /statistical question to answer: how do we detect such phenomenon in a set-up where the observations are scarce, noisy and always fluctuating ? I will start by describing Unitary Events methods (first introduced by Grün in the 90's) which makes rigorous the distinction between synchronization and pure coincidence and how statistical testing procedure can distinguish both. Then I will explain how to mimic distributions under independence to find out detection threshold for synchronization.