Binless strategies for estimation of information from neural data

We present an approach to estimate information carried by experimentally observed neural spike trains elicited by known stimuli. This approach makes use of an embedding of the observed spike trains into a set of vector spaces, and entropy estimates based on the nearest-neighbor Euclidean distances within these vector spaces [L. F. Kozachenko and N. N. Leonenko, Probl. Peredachi Inf. 23, 9 (1987)]. Using numerical examples, we show that this approach can be dramatically more efficient than standard bin-based approaches such as the “direct” method [S. P. Strong, R. Koberle, R. R. de Ruyter van Steveninck, and W. Bialek, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 197 (1998)] for amounts of data typically available from laboratory experiments.