[NEW PROJECT]: Extend auto-merge to fix drift-related spilts

[alejoe91]

Project title: Extend auto-merge to fix drift-related spilts

Key Investigators

• Alessio Buccino

Project Description

Residuals drifts in the recording could cause a unit to be over-split due to slow drifting over time. When this happens, usually spikes from the unit get assigned to a different unit after a certain point, as in this example:

Using this temporal overlap information, we could extend the auto-merge function to find and fix this drift-related splits. For example, we could use the "presence_ratio" increase merged as an additional step in the auto-merge function.

Objectives

The goal of the project is to extend the auto-merge function to target this specific kinds of oversplits.

Approach and Plan

• Identify a few datasets and drift-related oversplits examples
• Explore strategies to automatically detect potential merges (e.g., presence ratio, overlap in activity, etc.)
• Test performance on identified oversplits example
• Extend performance test to IBL dataset
• Modify auto-merge function with new steps

Progress

Fill in with tentative milestones (or leave blank for later):

• Make PR to SpikeInterface