Propagation of Chaos and Poisson Hypothesis for Replica Mean-Field Models
In order to model neural computations resulting from myriads of neuronal interactions, intensity-based spiking neural networks are commonly used. Unfortunately, most relevant dynamics involve complex graphs of interactions for which an exact computational treatment is impossible. To circumvent this difficulty, the replica-mean-field approach focuses on randomly interacting replicas of the networks of interest. In contrast with classical thermodynamic mean-fields, interaction couplings do not scale with the number of neurons and preserve both the geometry of the network and the finite-size correlations. In the limit of an infinite number of replicas, these networks become analytically tractable under the so-called Poisson Hypothesis, which postulates that replicas become asymptotically independent and arrivals to a given neuron become Poisson distributed. This hypothesis is often conjectured or numerically validated but not proven. We show the validity of the Poisson Hypothesis for large classes of processes that include for example Galves-Löcherbach models.