A comparison of two techniques for analyzing neuronal interspike intervals: autocorrelation and relative interval coding

Only two theoretical approaches for serial order analysis of spike trains seem to be practical and to preserve a degree of the sequential ordering of the intervals. We herein compared these approaches, employing the two common techniques for autocorrelation and a group of relative interval coding techniques, using 4 short, idealized trains of spike intervals. The relative interval coding approach seemed to be more sensitive for accurately specifying and analyzing serial order. The autocorrelation methods create ambiguity because of inherent "partitioning" effects in the computation and because the interrelations among peaks in the correlogram can be deceptive.