LAUSR

Background Nerve discharge is the carrier of information transmission, which can reveal the basic rules of various nerve activities. Recognition of the nerve discharge rhythm is the key to correctly understand the dynamic behavior of the nervous system. The previous methods for the nerve discharge recognition almost depended on the traditional statistical features, and the nonlinear dynamical features of the discharge activity. The artificial extraction and the empirical judgment of the features were required for the recognition. Thus, these methods suffered from subjective factors and were not conducive to the identification of a large number of discharge rhythms. Results The ability of automatic feature extraction along with the development of the neural network has been greatly improved. In this paper, an effective discharge rhythm classification model based on sparse auto-encoder was proposed. The sparse auto-encoder was used to construct the feature learning network. The simulated discharge data from the Chay model and its variants were taken as the input of the network, and the fused features, including the network learning features, covariance and approximate entropy of nerve discharge, were classified by Softmax. The results showed that the accuracy of the classification on the testing data was 87.5%, which could provide more accurate classification results. Compared with other methods for the identification of nerve discharge types, this method could extract the characteristics of nerve discharge rhythm automatically without artificial design, and show a higher accuracy. Conclusions The sparse auto-encoder, even neural network has not been used to classify the basic nerve discharge from neither biological experiment data nor model simulation data. The automatic classification method of nerve discharge rhythm based on the sparse auto-encoder in this paper reduced the subjectivity and misjudgment of the artificial feature extraction, saved the time for the comparison with the traditional method, and improved the intelligence of the classification of discharge types. It could further help us to recognize and identify the nerve discharge activities in a new way. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12859-022-04592-3.