Body: <p>I've seen several people say that sigmoids are like a saturating firing rate of a neuron but I don't see how or why they interpret it as such. I especially don't see the relationship between a &quot;rate&quot; (so a number of something over time, I guess here it's the number that a neuron activates in a unit of time) and the sigmoid graph. For me it resembles more to the voltage output of an operational amplifier in some cases.</p>
  
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-03-21T22:20:27.037Z
Comments.Text: Sigmoid outputs a value between 0-1, this can be interpreted as the probability of the neuron ‘firing’.
Comments.UserDisplayName: David
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-03-21T23:17:18.470Z
Comments.Text: @DavidIreland that could be an interpretation. Like the probability of a neuron "firing" when the input is x is $\sigma (x)$ (where $\sigma$ denotes the sigmoid function).
Comments.UserDisplayName: Daviiid
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-03-22T09:26:40.187Z
Comments.Text: It would be nice if you could provide 1-2 references where people say "sigmoids are like a saturating firing rate of a neuron", just to have more context.
Comments.UserDisplayName: nbro
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-03-22T11:54:21.700Z
Comments.Text: @nbro You're right, sorry for this imprecision. So a friend of mine told me about this interpretation (it was given by his professor and he found it cool) and when I searched for it I found this post: https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/difference-of-activation-functions-in-neural-networks-in-general I agree it's not many people I just thought that since it's a professor who said it, he maybe have read/heard it somewhere else etc... ^^'
Comments.UserDisplayName: Daviiid
Tags: <artificial-neuron><neurons><sigmoid>
Title: Why is the sigmoid function interpreted as a saturating firing rate of a neuron?
UserDisplayName: Daviiid
ThreadText: # Why is the sigmoid function interpreted as a saturating firing rate of a neuron?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2021-03-21)
  
  I've seen several people say that sigmoids are like a saturating firing rate of a neuron but I don't see how or why they interpret it as such. I especially don't see the relationship between a "rate" (so a number of something over time, I guess here it's the number that a neuron activates in a unit of time) and the sigmoid graph. For me it resembles more to the voltage output of an operational amplifier in some cases.
  
  **Tags:** artificial-neuron, neurons, sigmoid
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: Sigmoid outputs a value between 0-1, this can be interpreted as the probability of the neuron ‘firing’.  
  > **username_0**: @DavidIreland that could be an interpretation. Like the probability of a neuron "firing" when the input is x is $\sigma (x)$ (where $\sigma$ denotes the sigmoid function).  
  > **username_2**: It would be nice if you could provide 1-2 references where people say "sigmoids are like a saturating firing rate of a neuron", just to have more context.  
  > **username_0**: @nbro You're right, sorry for this imprecision. So a friend of mine told me about this interpretation (it was given by his professor and he found it cool) and when I searched for it I found this post: https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/difference-of-activation-functions-in-neural-networks-in-general I agree it's not many people I just thought that since it's a professor who said it, he maybe have read/heard it somewhere else etc... ^^'  
  
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  ## 0 answers
  
  