Introduction
The spectro-temporal receptive field (STRF) of a neuron is defined as the linear filter that, when convolved with the spectro-temporal representation of an arbitrary stimulus, gives a linear estimate of the evoked firing rate [1]. A common method for STRF estimation uses the spike-triggered average (STA) to compute the mean stimulus pattern preceding every spike.
Here, we present a method that not only considers stimulus patterns that evoke spikes but also those after which no spikes occur. This results in a binary classification problem. We show that the STRF model is equivalent to the structure of a linear support vector machine (SVM) and propose the use of SVMs for the estimation of the STRF. Based on this approach, we demonstrate that the obtained STRFs are a better predictor for spiking and non-spiking behavior of a neuron.