Frobenius Filter
Andy G. Lozowski
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
a.lozowski@ieee.org
In biological neural networks, most sensor neurons per-
form a very simple function. Their role is to detect an
input stimulus and perhaps react to varying intensity
of the stimulus. Neurons produce spikes at the output.
Naturally, information coding is straightforward here:
the more stimulus is delivered to the sensor neuron,
the more frequent its output firing. Many experimental
approaches were based on response measurements and
fitting of concentration-response curves to data. Typ-
ically, the average interspike interval of the receptors
has an asymptotic dependency on the stimulus inten-
sity. An example of such measurements can be found
in [1].
There are sensory systems, where more than one type
of stimulus is to be detected. Living organisms per-
ceive odors as sensations caused by mixtures of odorant
molecules. Various odorant molecules excite different
groups of receptors. A superposition of these excita-
tions constitute the odor as detected by the olfactory
bulb [2]. The relative concentrations of individual com-
ponents constitute the odor type, whereas the absolute
concentrations determine the odor intensity.
The neurophysiological evidence suggests that the pro-
cessing of sensory information in biological neural net-
works is distributed among many neurons. There is no
localized units in the network that would be responsi-
ble for one bit of information. Rather, the information
is spread among many neurons that act collectively.
Therefore it is reasonable to assume that a collection
of sensory neurons dealing with mixed stimuli produce
a mix of interspike intervals, such as the one shown
in Fig. 1. In the figure, the signal contains a set of one
hundred intervals. The intervals can occur in any se-
quence, as there is no temporal relationship between in-
tervals. The interspike interval mix can be represented
by a one-dimensional random variable τin with values
governed by the probability distribution p(τ ). Number
p(τ ) relates to the frequency of occurrence of interval τ
in a given mix.
The difficulty with sensory spiking signals is that they
Figure 1: A neural signal fragment containing 100 inter-
spike intervals.
Pr = 1−c
τk
τin Shift−map
Pr = c
Figure 2: Frobenius filter is a shift-map with input. Ei-
ther the input interval τin or the present output
interval τk is transformed into the next output
interval τk+1 .
cannot be overlapped. Interspike intervals, as received
from the sensors, are determined between two consecu-
tive spikes. There is no temporal coding involved at the
sensors, other than simple temporal modulation with
the stimulus intensity. This is why sensory systems,
such as the olfactory system, are equipped with a mech-
anism of converging the information to more compact
spatiotemporal representation [3].
We propose to use a mechanism to assign a temporal
structure to a given interspike interval mix. A one-
dimensional shift map τk → τk+1 is the simplest yet
sufficient method to add an order to the mix of inter-
spike intervals. Note that there are many ways to ac-
complish this task. We suggest one described in [4] that
is very suitable to our problem. The shift map is derived
directly from the invariant density of a Markov process
by solving the inverse Frobenius-Peron problem. The
Markov process is defined to match the probability den-
sity function p(τ ) of a given interspike interval mix [5].
Suppose we already have derived a shift-map h : τk →
τk+1 capable of producing a temporal sequence {τk }
with the distribution of interspike intervals conforming
to the given p(τ ). We now introduce a signal processing
scheme as shown in Fig. 2. We will refer to it as the
Frobenius filter. The input to the filter is a random
neural signal τin . The Frobenius filter is simply a shift-
map with the feedback loop controlled by a random
switch. The switch operation is described by a two-
valued stochastic process ξ : {0, 1} × N → R. The filter
is producing time intervals based on the switch position.
At every interval k, the switch position depends on the
value of ξk governed by probabilities:
Pr(ξk = 1) = c (1)
Pr(ξk = 0) = 1 − c (2)
Figure 3: Three instances of a Frobenius filter stimulated by an input distribution for 20000 iterations. Quadratic distance
di between cumulative distributions of interspike intervals at the input and the output of the filter is graphed.
where c ∈ [0; 1] is a constant parameter. When ξk = 1,
the filter is receiving the input τin . The opposite posi-
tion of the switch (ξk = 0) lets the shift-map determine
the output time interval based on the previous interval.
The overall filter equation reads:
 
τk+1 = h ξk τin + (1 − ξk )τk (3)
The notion of the switch is an attempt to model a com-
petition between the input and the feedback.
In order to illustrate the operation of the Frobenius fil-
ter, the shift-map was stimulated at the input by values
generated by three different probability distributions
pA , pB , and pC representing three different interspike
interval mixes. In each instance, K = 20000 random
values τin were drawn from the input distribution and
applied with probability c = 0.5 to the filter.
The shift-map was derived from the input probability
distribution pA . Figure 3 shows the result of the follow-
ing comparison: The input values τin were sorted and
stored. Note that the graph of such a sorted arrange-
ment of τin R would follow
R the cumulative
R distribution
functions pA (τ )dτ , pB (τ )dτ , and pC (τ )dτ . The
realization of the sequence {τk } generated by the Frobe-
nius filter for K iterations were also sorted in the same
manner. The sorted output sequence was then com-
pared to the sorted input sequence in Fig. 3. In detail,
the graphs in the figure are the sequences of quadratic
distances between the sorted sequences in each of the
three instances. The horizontal line is the mean square
value of the distance graphs.
As seen in the figure, the input-output sequences gen-
erated with the input density pA applied, is synchro-
nized in a sense that the quadratic distance between
input and output interval distributions is small. The
distances in all the other cases are significantly larger.
By detecting low distance between the input and the
output of the filter, a stimulus recognition mechanism
can be devised.
The proposed mechanism uses a pattern matching phe-
nomenon which signals successful detection as a de-
creased distance between parameters of the input and
the output neural signals. The pattern matching is not
based on coherence of the two signals. In case of the
matched pair, the similarity is in the statistical proper-
ties of the input and the output signals.
The Frobenius filter also demonstrates the trade-off
that is possible when processing sensory information
with neural signals. One may contain the information
in thousands of spiking signals. At any given time the
information is included in the distribution of interspike
intervals, which can be assembled by combining all the
signals together in one histogram. In the other extreme,
one might let a shift-map oscillate for a long time and
extract the interspike interval distribution from the gen-
erated sequence. The shift map is a deterministic rep-
resentation of the input interspike distribution. More
importantly, the shift-map produces the temporal se-
quence which has a unique signature in a sense that
it is receivable through synchronization with a coinci-
dence detector.
References
[1] J. P. Rospars, P. Lansky, P. Duchamp-Viret, and
A. Duchamp, ”Spiking frequency versus odorant con-
centration in olfactory receptor neurons,” BioSystems,
vol. 58, pp. 133-141, 2000.
[2] T. A. Dickinson, J. White, J. S. Kauer, and D. R.
Walt, ”Current trends in ’artificial-nose’ technology,”
Trends in Biotechnology, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 250-258,
June 1998.
[3] R. W. Friedrich and G. Laurent, ”Dynamic opti-
mization of odor representations by slow temporal pat-
terning of mitral cell activity,” Science, vol. 291, pp.
889-894, Feb. 2001.
[4] D. Pingel, P. Schmelcher, and F. K. Diakonos,
”Theory and examples of the inverse Frobenius-Perron
problem for complete chaotic maps,” Chaos, vol. 9, no.
2, pp. 357-366, 2000.
[5] A. G. Lozowski and B. L. Noble, ”Processing tem-
poral sequences,” in Proc. of the 45th Midwest Sym-
posium on Circuits and Systems (MSCAS’02), vol. 1,
Tulsa, Oklahoma, Aug. 4-7, 2002, pp. 180-183.