Spikebench: an open benchmark for spike train time-series classification

Modern well-performing approaches to neural decoding are based on machine learning models such as decision tree ensembles and deep neural networks. The wide range of algorithms that can be utilized to learn from neural spike trains, which are essentially time-series data, results in the need for diverse and challenging benchmarks for neural decoding, similar to the ones in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. In this work, we propose a spike train classification benchmark, based on open-access neural activity datasets and consisting of several learning tasks such as stimulus type classification, animal’s behavioral state prediction and neuron type identification. We demonstrate that an approach based on hand-crafted time-series feature engineering establishes a strong baseline performing on par with state-of-the-art deep learning based models for neural decoding. We release the code allowing to reproduce the reported results . Author summary Machine learning-based neural decoding has been shown to outperform the traditional approaches like Wiener and Kalman filters on certain key tasks [1]. To further the advancement of neural decoding models, such as improvements in deep neural network architectures and better feature engineering for classical ML models, there need to exist common evaluation benchmarks similar to the ones in the fields of computer vision or natural language processing. In this work, we propose a benchmark consisting of several individual neuron spike train classification tasks based on open-access data from a range of animals and brain regions. We demonstrate that it is possible to achieve meaningful results in such a challenging benchmark using the massive time-series feature extraction approach, which is found to perform similarly to state-of-the-art deep learning approaches.