Differences in the subthreshold dynamics of leaky integrate-and-fire and Hodgkin-Huxley neuron models

Many spiking neuron models have been proposed over the last decades with varying computational complexity and abstraction from biological neurons. Among the few studies that have compared spiking models, little emphasis has been given to the formal description of calibration methods in tuning model parameters. We give an example of calibrating a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron with the first-spike time of a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron. We further demonstrate how model parameters can be tuned to minimize subthreshold differences in membrane potential. This example emphasizes the dependencies of calibration methods on other experimental parameters, complicating detailed comparisons of spiking models.