LAUSR

Spike train distances have gained increasing attention in the neuroscience community and provided an important tool to quantify the similarity between spike trains. A number of comparisons of the spike train distances have been carried out and mainly focused on the discriminative or clustering ability of the spike train distance. This paper proposes a spike train distance-based method to compare repeatability and linearity of mechanoreceptive afferents. The compared spike train distances include both parameter-dependent and parameter-free distances. We examined these two features on the response of mechanoreceptive afferents under the sinusoidal stimuli. We demonstrated that the parameter-dependent spike train distances (i.e., the Victor–Purpura distance and the van Rossum distance) consistently outperform the parameter-free ones (i.e., the ISI distance, the SPIKE distance, and the Event-Synchronization distance) in terms of repeatability and linearity of mechanoreceptive afferents.