QUANTAL ANALYSIS USING MAXIMUM-ENTROPY NOISE DECONVOLUTION

When applying quantal analysis to synaptic transmission it is often unclear how much of the measured postsynaptic signal fluctuation arises from random sampling and noise rather than from the probabilistic transmitter release process. Unconstrained noise deconvolution methods do not overcome this because they tend to overfit the data, often giving a misleading picture of the underlying process. Instead, maximum entropy deconvolution provides a solution which is the smoothest, or most featureless, distribution that is still compatible with the data, taking noise and sample size into account. A simple way of achieving this is described, together with results of Monte Carlo simulations which show that the features present in the maximum entropy solution usually reflect the process underlying the data and not random sampling or noise.