Analysis of trial-by-trial variability in stimulus-evoked neural activity

Using standard dimensionality reduction analysis we examined the stimulus-evoked neural activity over time and their variability across trials. Consistent with earlier results, we found that odor pulses evoked spatio-temporal responses distributed throughout an ensemble of simultaneous recorded neurons. Responses clustered based on odor identity despite the presence of a relatively small amount of trial-by-trial variability. We found that this scatter across trials can be reduced using a simple linear projection of the data.