On the efficient calculation of van Rossum distances

The van Rossum metric measures the distance between two spike trains. Measuring a single van Rossum distance between one pair of spike trains is not a computationally expensive task, however, many applications require a matrix of distances between all the spike trains in a set or the calculation of a multi-neuron distance between two populations of spike trains. Moreover, often these calculations need to be repeated for many different parameter values. An algorithm is presented here to render these calculation less computationally expensive, making the complexity linear in the number of spikes rather than quadratic.