Connections in a RatNetwork between RatNetInputNodes, RatNetOutputNodes, RatNetIaFNodes or RatNetVecOpNodes.
The connection may either propagate continuous values or spikes according to the eventType field which is normally concealed in favour of acces from the RatNetworkEditor.
All links can optionally interpolate or rebin the source activity vector to fit onto the target population, according to the value of the fit parameter. If this is set to one-one then no modification takes place, and the actual width of the data is the smaller of the source nad target population sizes.
The difference between rebinning and interpolating is that rebinning always produces a value which ws present in the original vector whereas interpolation takes an average between neighbouring points. Eg, rebinning the vector [1,2,3] onto a population of six cells would produce [1,1,2,2,3,3]. Interpolating it would produce [1,1.4,1.8,2.2,2.6,3]. Since spiking outputs are treated as vectors of 0s and 1s, interpolating them effectively introduces the concept of fractional spikes. To keep the all-or-none nature of the events, the mapping should be one-one or rebin.
Connections only go one way, as indicated by arrows in the network editor. In the case that the target is a cell population, the strength is set by the forward conductance Gfwd. For other target types Gfwd is ignored. If Gfwd is large, the membrane potential of each target cell closely follows that of the corresponding source cell. This is a convenient way to intrucuce relay populations, for example one can install place-holders within an integrate and fire network for receiving external input and then connect the RatNetwork inputs to these with high-conductance continuous links, to make them mimic the the source population.