Compressive-sensing Reconstruction of Network Connectivity

We develop a theoretical framework for efficiently reconstructing sparse feed-forward connections in a pulse-coupled nonlinear network through its output activities. Using only a small ensemble of random inputs, we solve this inverse problem through the compressive sensing theory based on a hidden linear structure intrinsic to the nonlinear network dynamics. The accuracy of the reconstruction is further verified by the fact that complex inputs can be well recovered using the reconstructed connectivity.