Processing of time series by neural circuits with biologically realistic synaptic dynamics

Thomas Natschläger, Wolfgang Maass, Eduardo D. Sontag, Anthony Zador

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Experimental data show that biological synapses behave quite differently from the symbolic synapses in common artificial neural network models. Biological synapses are dynamic, i.e., their "weight" changes on a short time scale by several hundred percent in dependence of the past input to the synapse. In this article we explore the consequences that these synaptic dynamics entail for the computational power of feedforward neural networks. We show that gradient descent suffices to approximate a given (quadratic) filter by a rather small neural system with dynamic synapses. We also compare our network model to artificial neural networks designed for time series processing. Our numerical results are complemented by theoretical analysis which show that even with just a single hidden layer such networks can approximate a surprisingly large large class of nonlinear filters: all filters that can be characterized by Volterra series. This result is robust with regard to various changes in the model for synaptic dynamics.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13 - Proceedings of the 2000 Conference, NIPS 2000
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
ISBN (Print)0262122413, 9780262122412
StatePublished - 2001
Event14th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, NIPS 2000 - Denver, CO, United States
Duration: Nov 27 2000Dec 2 2000

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Other

Other14th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, NIPS 2000
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver, CO
Period11/27/0012/2/00

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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