The akaike information criterion (AIC) is not a sufficient condition to determine the number of ion channel states from single channel recordings

Abstract

The Akaike information criterion (AIC) and other criteria that trade off the goodness-of-fit against the number of parameters have been used to determine the number of ion channel states from single channel recordings. We show that, in general, such criteria are not valid. This is illustrated by an elementary example in which the AIC yields an incorrect result. The implications of these findings for the discrimination of different kinetic models of ion channels are discussed.