Integrated information decomposition unveils major structural traits of in silico and in vitro neuronal networks

The properties of complex networked systems arise from the interplay between the dynamics of their elements and the underlying topology. Thus, to understand their behavior, it is crucial to convene as much information as possible about their topological organization. However, in large systems, such as neuronal networks, the reconstruction of such topology is usually carried out from the information encoded in the dynamics on the network, such as spike train time series, and by measuring the transfer entropy between system elements. The topological information recovered by these methods does not necessarily capture the connectivity layout, but rather the causal flow of information between elements. New theoretical frameworks, such as Integrated Information Decomposition (Φ-ID), allow one to explore the modes in which information can flow between parts of a system, opening a rich landscape of interactions between network topology, dynamics, and information. Here, we apply Φ-ID on in silico and in vitro data to decompose the usual transfer entropy measure into different modes of information transfer, namely, synergistic, redundant, or unique. We demonstrate that the unique information transfer is the most relevant measure to uncover structural topological details from network activity data, while redundant information only introduces residual information for this application. Although the retrieved network connectivity is still functional, it captures more details of the underlying structural topology by avoiding to take into account emergent high-order interactions and information redundancy between elements, which are important for the functional behavior, but mask the detection of direct simple interactions between elements constituted by the structural network topology.