title: The membrane potential process of a single neuron seen as a cumulative damage process.
abstract: A simple integrate-and-fire mechanism of a single neuron can be compared with a cumulative damage process, where the spiking process is analogous to rupture sequences of a material under cycles of stress. Although in some cases lognormal-like patterns can be recognized in the inter-spike times under a simple integrate-and-fire mechanism, fatigue life models as the inverse Gaussian distribution and the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution (which was recently introduced in the neural activity framework) provide theoretical arguments that make them more suitable for the modeling of the resulting inter-spike times.
authors.affiliation: Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Exactas, Universidad de Playa Ancha, Leopoldo Carvallo 270, Valparaiso, Chile.
authors.forename: Mauricio
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tejo
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Estadística, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas, Universidad de Concepción, Víctor Lamas 1290, Concepción, Chile.
authors.forename: Sebastián
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Niklitschek-Soto
keywords: Integrate-and-fire model; Inter-spike distribution; Inverse Gaussian and Birnbaum–Saunders distributions; Lognormal