Before revision:  This approach avoids the computationally expensive step of inferring latent variables, e.g. the biophysical parameters of individual cells or the particular realization of the full synaptic connectivity matrix, and directly learns model parameters which characterize the statistics of connectivity or  single-cell properties.
After revision:  This approach avoids the computationally expensive step of inferring latent variables, e.g. the biophysical parameters of individual cells or the particular realization of the full synaptic connectivity matrix, and directly learns model parameters which characterize the statistics of connectivity or of single-cell properties.