Information Transmitted From Bioinspired Neuron-Astrocyte Network Improves Cortical Spiking Network's Pattern Recognition Performance

We trained two spiking neural networks (SNNs), the cortical spiking network (CSN) and the cortical neuron-astrocyte network (CNAN), using a spike-based unsupervised method, on the MNIST and alpha-digit data sets and achieve an accuracy of 96.1% and 77.35%, respectively. We then connected CNAN to CSN by preserving maximum synchronization between them thanks to the concept of prolate spheroidal wave functions (PSWF). As a result, CSN receives additional information from CNAN without retraining. The important outcome is that CSN reaches 70.57% correct classification rate on capital letters without being trained on them. The overall contribution of transfer is 87.47%. We observed that for CSN the classifying neurons that relate to digits 0-9 of the alpha-digit data set are completely supported by the ones that relate to digits 0-9 of the MNIST data set. This means that CSN recognizes the similarity between the digits of the MNIST and alpha-digit data sets and classifies each digit of both data sets in the same class.