Identification of recurrent dynamics in distributed neural populations

Large-scale recordings of neural activity over broad anatomical areas with high spatial and temporal resolution are increasingly common in modern experimental neuroscience. Recently, recurrent switching dynamical systems have been used to tackle the scale and complexity of these data. However, an important challenge remains in providing insights into the existence and structure of recurrent linear dynamics in neural time series data. Here we test a scalable approach to time-varying autoregression with low-rank tensors to recover the recurrent dynamics in stochastic neural mass models with multiple stable attractors. We demonstrate that the parsimonious representation of time-varying system matrices in terms of temporal modes can recover the attractor structure of simple systems via clustering. We then consider simulations based on a human brain connectivity matrix in high and low global connection strength regimes, and reveal the hierarchical clustering structure of the dynamics. Finally, we explain the impact of the forecast time delay on the estimation of the underlying rank and temporal variability of the time series dynamics. This study illustrates that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to recover meaningful dynamic structure and that it is crucial to account for the three key timescales arising from dynamics, noise processes, and attractor switching.