Imperfect pulse detection in neural nets with temporal codes

The statistics of pulsed neural networks employing temporal codes (time to rth pulse) are investigated under conditions of imperfect pulse detection. The mixed negative binomial distributions that result are broadened by the errors without changing their essential shapes. For r=1, the near-geometric distributions primarily exhibit decreasing effective rate parameters. These results are important in deciding between rate codes and temporal codes in noisy or otherwise imperfect artificial neural (or biological) environments.