Identification of non-linear models of neural activity in BOLD fMRI

Non-linear hemodynamic models express the BOLD signal as a nonlinear, parametric functional of the temporal sequence of local neural activity. Several models have been proposed for this neural activity. We identify one such parametric model by estimating the distribution of its parameters. These distributions are themselves stochastic, therefore we estimate their variance by epoch based leave-one-out cross validation, using a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for sampling of the posterior parameter distribution