Fast inference of couplings between integrate-and-fire neurons from their spiking activity

Multi-electrode recordings make available the simultaneous spiking activity of tens of neurons for hours [1]. An important issue is to reconstruct the network of connections between the cells from this activity. To be more precise, let us model cells as Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons (see [2] and references therein) whose membrane potentials obey the differential equation (units are chosen so that the membrane capacitance equals unity),