Matched transient and steady-state approximation of first-passage-time distributions of coloured noise driven leaky neurons

Abstract: The first-passage-time distribution of a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron driven by a characteristically coloured noise is approximated by matching a transient and a steady-state solution of the membrane voltage distribution. These approximations follow from a simple manipulation, made possible by the specific eigen' colouring of the noise, which allows to express the membrane potential as a Gaussian diffusion process on top of a deterministic exponential movement. Following, the presented method is extended to the case of an arbitrarily coloured noise driving by factoring out theeigen' noise and replacing the residue with an equivalent Gaussian process. It is shown that the obtained expressions agree well with numerical simulations for different values of the neuron parameters and noise colouring.