Before revision:  We show that our method is more than 300 times faster than traditional approaches for particularly large, sparse spike trains, and still more than 10 times faster for large, but considerably less sparse, spike trains . A MATLAB function executing the method described here was made freely available on-line.
After revision:  We show that our method is more than 300 times faster than the O (n ln n) method which is a current standard for quickly computing the Kendall correlation. In addition to providing a faster algorithm, we emphasize the role that taking the specific nature of spike trains had on reducing the run time. We imagine that there are many other useful algorithms that can be even more significantly sped up when taking this into consideration. A MATLAB function executing the method described here was made freely available on-line.