A new multi-neuron spike train metric

The Victor-Purpura spike train metric has recently been extended to a family of multineuron metrics and used to analyze spike trains recorded simultaneously from pairs of proximate neurons. The metric is one of the two metrics commonly used for quantifying the distance between two spike trains; the other is the van Rossum metric. Here, we suggest an extension of the van Rossum metric to a multineuron metric. We believe this gives a metric that is both natural and easy to calculate. Both types of multineuron metric are applied to simulated data and are compared.