A temporal kernel-based model for tracking hand movements from neural activities

We devise and experiment with a dynamical kernel-based system for tracking hand movements from neural activity. The state of the system corresponds to the hand location, velocity, and acceleration, while the system’s input are the instantaneous spike rates. The system’s state dy-namics is defined as a combination of a linear mapping from the previous estimated state and a kernel-based mapping tailored for modeling neural activities. In contrast to generative models, the activity-to-state mapping is learned using discriminative methods by minimizing a noise-robust loss function. We use this approach to predict hand trajectories on the basis of neural activity in motor cortex of behaving monkeys and find that the proposed approach is more accurate than both a static approach based on support vector regression and the Kalman filter.