Inferring the temporal evolution of synaptic weights from dynamic functional connectivity

How to capture the temporal evolution of synaptic weights from measures of dynamic functional connectivity between the activity of different simultaneously recorded neurons is an important and open problem in systems neuroscience. Here, we report methodological progress to address this issue. We first simulated recurrent neural network models of spiking neurons with spike timing-dependent plasticity mechanisms that generate time-varying synaptic and functional coupling. We then used these simulations to test analytical approaches that infer fixed and time-varying properties of synaptic connectivity from directed functional connectivity measures, such as cross-covariance and transfer entropy. We found that, while both cross-covariance and transfer entropy provide robust estimates of which synapses are present in the network and their communication delays, dynamic functional connectivity measured via cross-covariance better captures the evolution of synaptic weights over time. We also established how measures of information transmission delays from static functional connectivity computed over long recording periods (i.e., several hours) can improve shorter time-scale estimates of the temporal evolution of synaptic weights from dynamic functional connectivity. These results provide useful information about how to accurately estimate the temporal variation of synaptic strength from spiking activity measures.