Clustering on similarity matrix about spykesim

[rcojocaru]

I think I have managed to understand why you do the clustering directly on the similarity matrix. I had never seen it done this way, but I think it makes sense. This way, for each window, you use its similarity with all the other windows as a set of features on which the final clustering is based. This is what makes the code flexible enough to catch certain patterns from real data. Maybe the auto-similarity (main diagonal of the similarity matrix) is a bit problematic here, as sometimes it can contain very high values - but with many neurons it will not really affect the outcome.

The downside of this method is that some windows will be added to a cluster without actually having similar neuron activity (which is what I think is happening with the extra cluster from the tutorial, which even has 10 windows with 0 active neurons). There will also be "quiet clusters", formed out of windows with very little neuron activity, not necessarily similar in any other way. I see you exclude some of these windows/clusters when you compute the profiles. It might be interesting to use this process to also trim down the clusters members, to know at the end how many windows actually correspond to the cluster profiles obtained.

Anyhow, my initial issue is not really valid, sorry! Feel free to close it.

[KeitaW]

Sorry for the late reply. But

The downside of this method is that some windows will be added to a cluster without actually having similar neuron activity (which is what I think is happening with the extra cluster from the tutorial, which even has 10 windows with 0 active neurons). There will also be "quiet clusters", formed out of windows with very little neuron activity, not necessarily similar in any other way. I see you exclude some of these windows/clusters when you compute the profiles. It might be interesting to use this process to also trim down the clusters members, to know at the end how many windows actually correspond to the cluster profiles obtained.

part is surely an interesting enhancement of the feature. Let me take a look at code and see how easy/hard to implement that.