Characterizing neural phase-space trajectories via Principal Louvain Clustering.

Background: With the growing size and richness of neuroscience datasets in terms of dimension, volume, and resolution, identifying spatiotemporal patterns in those datasets is increasingly important. Multivariate dimension-reduction methods are particularly adept at addressing these challenges.

New Method: In this paper, we propose a novel method, which we refer to as Principal Louvain Clustering (PLC), to identify clusters in a low-dimensional data subspace, based on time-varying trajectories of spectral dynamics across multisite local field potential (LFP) recordings in awake behaving mice. Data were recorded from prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and parietal cortex in eleven mice while they explored novel and familiar environments.

Results: PLC-identified subspaces and clusters showed high consistency across animals, and were modulated by the animals' ongoing behavior.

Conclusions: PLC adds to an important growing literature on methods for characterizing dynamics in high-dimensional datasets, using a smaller number of parameters. The method is also applicable to other kinds of datasets, such as EEG or MEG.