Decoding stimuli from multi-source neural responses

Spike trains and local field potentials (LFPs) are two different manifestations of neural activity recorded simultaneously from the same electrode array and contain complementary information of stimuli or behaviors. This paper proposes a tensor product kernel based decoder, which allows modeling the sample from different sources individually and mapping them onto the same reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) defined by the tensor product of the individual kernels for each source, where linear regression is conducted to identify the nonlinear mapping from the multi-type neural responses to the stimuli. The decoding results of the rat sensory stimulation experiment show that the tensor-product-kernel-based decoder outperforms the decoders with either single-type neural activities.