Wayne E. Mackey

Sheng Liu, Mark Cheng, Hayley Brooks et al.

We propose a nonparametric model for time series with missing data based on low-rank matrix factorization. The model expresses each instance in a set of time series as a linear combination of a small number of shared basis functions. Constraining the functions and the corresponding coefficients to be nonnegative yields an interpretable low-dimensional representation of the data. A time-smoothing regularization term ensures that the model captures meaningful trends in the data, instead of overfitting short-term fluctuations. The low-dimensional representation makes it possible to detect outliers and cluster the time series according to the interpretable features extracted by the model, and also to perform forecasting via kernel regression. We apply our methodology to a large real-world dataset of infant-sleep data gathered by caregivers with a mobile-phone app. Our analysis automatically extracts daily-sleep patterns consistent with the existing literature. This allows us to compute sleep-development trends for the cohort, which characterize the emergence of circadian sleep and different napping habits. We apply our methodology to detect anomalous individuals, to cluster the cohort into groups with different sleeping tendencies, and to obtain improved predictions of future sleep behavior.

David J. Heeger, Wayne E. Mackey

Working memory is a cognitive process that is responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating information. Most of the empirical neuroscience research on working memory has focused on measuring sustained activity in prefrontal cortex (PFC) and/or parietal cortex during simple delayed-response tasks, and most of the models of working memory have been based on neural integrators. But working memory means much more than just holding a piece of information online. We describe a new theory of working memory, based on a recurrent neural circuit that we call ORGaNICs (Oscillatory Recurrent GAted Neural Integrator Circuits). ORGaNICs are a variety of Long Short Term Memory units (LSTMs), imported from machine learning and artificial intelligence. ORGaNICs can be used to explain the complex dynamics of delay-period activity in prefrontal cortex (PFC) during a working memory task. The theory is analytically tractable so that we can characterize the dynamics, and the theory provides a means for reading out information from the dynamically varying responses at any point in time, in spite of the complex dynamics. ORGaNICs can be implemented with a biophysical (electrical circuit) model of pyramidal cells, combined with shunting inhibition via a thalamocortical loop. Although introduced as a computational theory of working memory, ORGaNICs are also applicable to models of sensory processing, motor preparation and motor control. ORGaNICs offer computational advantages compared to other varieties of LSTMs that are commonly used in AI applications. Consequently, ORGaNICs are a framework for canonical computation in brains and machines.