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arXiv · 2607.28779

Bits per Spike as a Betting Game: An Interpretable Unit for Held-Out Log-Likelihood in Neural Data Analysis

Alex H. Williams
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Abstract

Held-out log-likelihood is the standard currency for comparing statistical models of neural spike trains, and is often reported as bits per spike relative to a homogeneous Poisson baseline. The units of this metric are difficult to reason about: it is rarely obvious whether an improvement of, say, $0.34$ bits per spike is a large effect or a negligible one. This note develops an interpretation of held-out log-likelihood borrowed from game-theoretic statistics. If $L$ denotes a model's expected log-likelihood ratio to the homogeneous Poisson baseline, then we show that $-\log(α) / L$ represents the number of heldout time bins of recording needed to reject the baseline at level $α$ under a particular null hypothesis testing procedure based on a betting game. Thus, a simple re-scaling of the log-likelihood yields an intuitive metric of model performance in units of recording time which answers "how much held out data would I need, on average, to disprove the null." We illustrate the construction on head-direction cells recorded in mouse anterior thalamus, where a generalized linear model reaches significance in roughly $120$ ms of held-out data for a strongly tuned cell and roughly $11$ s for a moderately tuned cell.

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BibTeXRIS

Alex H. Williams. 2026-08-28. Bits per Spike as a Betting Game: An Interpretable Unit for Held-Out Log-Likelihood in Neural Data Analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28779

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