11.09.2013

Felix Wichmann member in NeuroStats 2014 committee

Felix Wichmann is a member of the scientific committee at NeuroStats 2014 ("Statistical Challenges in Neuroscience") taking place on September 3rd to 5th, 2014 at University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

<link http: www2.warwick.ac.uk fac sci statistics crism workshops neuroscience external-link-new-window externen link in neuem>Link to NeuroStats 2014

Neuroscience is a very diverse field, as its central object - the brain - can be approached from a bewildering variety of angles, studied at any scale from molecular to behavioural, and measured, probed and prodded in myriad different ways. Each of these methods, from 2-photon imaging to reinforcement learning experiments, comes with its own statistical challenges. Some of these challenges will be highly familiar to statisticians, because they include some of the most active research areas in statistics and machine learning: for example, studies of anatomy yield partially observed network data, reverse correlation experiments lead to a large-p small-n regression problem, fMRI comes with big data issues, etc. Others will be less familiar, for example the issues arising from non-stationarity in behavioural experiments, that of inter-individual differences, or that of measuring probabilistic dependence between spiking neurons. These problems are central to the development of methodology in neuroscience and should appeal to many statisticians.

The workshop aims to bring together neuroscientists (interested in methodological issues) and statisticians (interested in new applications) with the goal to (a) introduce the neuroscience community to recent developments within statistics and (b) raise awareness within the statistics community of some of the challenges that arise in the analysis of neuroscientific data.