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The competition is currently open for submissions. Please browse to the individual challenges to upload your contribution. Note that you need to login first. If you don't have an account yet, please register.

 

Quantitative Single-Neuron Modeling 2009

How well are single-cell properties reproduced by present-day neuronal models? Recently, several labs have approached this question by assessing the quality of neuron models with respect to spike timing prediction or characteristic features of the voltage trace. So far, all modelers have used their own preferred performance measure on their datasets. The Quantitative Single-Neuron Modeling Competition offers a coherent framework to compare neuronal models and fitting methods.

See Science Perspectives for this competition.

If you want to cite the competition or if you want to use data from one of the challenges A-C please use this SCIENCE article as a reference:
How Good Are Neuron Models? Science 16 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5951, pp. 379 - 380 DOI: 10.1126/science.1181936

Participation

Participants can submit their prediction to one or more of the challenges A, B, C and D.
Anyone can participate and any type of model is accepted.

Goal

This competition is an opportunity to bridge the gap between experimentalists and modelers. The Quantitative Single-Neuron Modeling Competition is an invitation to compare your methods and models to those of other people in the field. Past competitions remain available on this website and will serve as benchmarks (Jolivet et al 2008a, Jolivet et al 2008b). Prizes will be given to outstanding contributions.

Prizes

Prizes will be awarded according to the “Rules and Conditions” specified below.

  • The INCF Prize (10 000 CHF) is given to the participant(s) providing a significant win in at least 2 of the four challenges.
  • The FACETS Award (500 CHF) is shared between all participants providing a shared win in a single challenge. 

Important Dates

  • Submissions via this website opened on July 15, 2009.
  • Submission deadline has been August 25, 2009.
  • Results have been presented at the INCF Congress of Neuroinformaticsin Pilsen, September 6-8, 2009.

RULES AND CONDITIONS

  1. Winning conditions. The prizes are given upon the disclosure of the model. Winning participants who fail to provide the source code to the organizers in the time between the submission date and the day before the disclosure of the results will be removed from the competition. Once the results have been verified by the organizers and the details of the winning model/method have been published on the competition website the organizers will communicate with the winners to give the money prize. The INCF Prize (10 000 CHF) is payed as a honorary to the participant(s) providing a significant win in at least 2 of the challenges. The FACETS Award (500 CHF) is payed as a honorary to the participant(s) providing a significant win in a single challenge or shared equally between participants providing a shared win in a single challenge. The participants keep the right to publish their model in journals and conferences.
  2. EPFL employees. EPFL employees may take part in the competition as regular participants but they cannot receive the honorary linked to the FACETS Award or the INCF Prize. The EPFL employee who wins either INCF Prize or FACETS Award will receive the certificate associated with his prize, his name will appear in the results, but the money prize will not be awarded that year.
  3. Shared INCF prize. It is possible that two participants win the INCF Prize, in this case the money prize is shared equally.
  4. Significant win. A performance in one of the challenges that surpasses the second best performance in the same challenge by more than one standard error of the mean is considered a significant win. The value of performance and standard deviation is defined in each challenge “Evaluation Methods”. There is maximum one significant win per challenge. There can be a significant win in a single challenge only if it receives at least three submissions.
  5. Shared win. All participants in a challenge having performances that fall within one standard error of the mean of the best performance are said to achieve a shared win. In this case, the honorary associated with the prize is shared between the best participant and these others. The participant with the best performance is also a shared win. In this way there is either zero or minimum two shared wins per challenge. The value of performance and standard deviation is defined in each challenge Evaluation Methods. There can be a shared win in a single challenge only if it receives at least three submissions.
  6. Collective Submission. Multiple people can collaborate to make a submission. In which case the first name within the collaborators is the responsible author. The responsible author of the submission is called the participant.
  7. Single Submission. A participant can only submit once per challenge.

 

Details including the definition of the 4 individual challenges and the evaluation procedures are available via the individual subsections linked below or from the instructions.

The training and testing data for the challenges are available from their individual sections.

The challenge is organized by Richard Naud under the leadership of Wulfram Gerstner at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, who also provide the prize money.

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Full Instructions
Challenge A
Challenge B
Challenge C
Challenge D