Abstract
Within neuroscience, models have many roles, including driving hypotheses, making assumptions explicit, synthesizing knowledge, making experimental predictions, and facilitating applications to medicine. While specific modeling techniques are often taught, the process of constructing models for a given phenomenon or question is generally left opaque. Here, informed by guiding many students through modeling exercises at our CoSMo summer school we provide a practical ten step breakdown of the modeling process. This approach makes choices and criteria more explicit and replicable. Experiment design has long been taught in neuroscience; the modeling process should receive the same attention.
Significance Modeling in Neuroscience is often perceived as a mysterious process and is hard to teach. Here we provide the first how-to-model guide that breaks down the modeling endeavor into a step-by-step process.
Footnotes
Author reports no Conflicts of interest.
This work was supported with funding from NIH, USA (R25; MH109110-01) and The Brain Canada Foundation, Canada.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
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