What can we learn about the functional organization of cortical microcircuits from large-scale recordings of neural activity?   To obtain an explicit and interpretable model of time-dependent functional connections between neurons and to establish the dynamics of the cortical information flow, we develop 'dynamic neural relational inference' (dNRI). We study  both synthetic and real-world neural spiking data and demonstrate that the developed method is able to uncover the dynamic relations between neurons more reliably than existing baselines.
We develop 'dynamic neural relational inference', a variational autoencoder model that can explicitly and interpretably represent the hidden dynamic relations between neurons.