Self-Exciting Population Event Models Reveal Abnormal Temporal Amplification in MAPT-Mutant Human Brain Assembloids

Abstract

Human brain assembloids provide a tractable platform for studying mutation-specific network dysfunction, but most studies do not distinguish whether abnormal activity arises from increased spontaneous initiation or stronger history-dependent amplification. We introduce a low-dimensional discrete-time self-exciting population model for calcium-imaging event sequences that separates baseline initiation (%[mu]), integrated history-dependent gain (%[eta]), and memory decay (%[tau]). Across 175 recordings from 13 MAPT p.R406W or CRISPR-corrected isogenic assembloids, biological-unit inference identified a 4.31-fold increase in %[eta] in mutants (95% CI 3.20- 5.84; exact p=7.8x10-4), without increased baseline activity. Parametric predictive checks exposed residual Poisson overdispersion; fixed-decay and beta-binomial sensitivity analyses nevertheless preserved the mutant history effect. Median %[eta] separated all 13 held-out assembloids, while a multifeature recording-level RBF-SVM achieved AUC 0.816 under nested whole-assembloid holdout. These results identify robust history-dependent temporal amplification as a functional MAPT-mutant network phenotype.