A critical survey of STDP in Spiking Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition

The bio-inspired concept of Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) derived from neurobiology is increasingly used in Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) nowadays. Mostly found in unsupervised learning, though recent work has shown its usefulness in supervised or reinforced paradigms too, STDP is a key element to understanding SNN architectures’ learning process. This review introduces a categorisation of its several variants and discusses their specificities and applications, from a pattern recognition perspective. It gathers a variety of definitions used in machine learning for pattern recognition. It provides relevant information for research communities of various backgrounds looking for an overview of this field.