The standard deviation of the noise, $σ$⁠, can be computed as the sample standard deviation of a portion of the data in which there were no calcium transients. The parameters that determine the speed of the rise and decay of the pulse, $α$ and $γ$⁠, are predominantly defined by characteristics of the fluorescent indicator that was used to generate the imaging data. In Table 1, we provide documented values of $α$ and $γ$ for four commonly used fluorescent indicators, extracted from the corresponding references: Cal-520 AM (Tada et al., 2014), OGB-1 AM (Lütcke, Gerhard, Zenke, Gerstner, & Helmchen, 2013), and GCaMP6f and GCaMP6s (Chen et al., 2013). These values can be used as a guideline; in practice, they will vary with the indicator expression level, as well as the cell type. We note that the time taken for a calcium transient to rise to its peak and the decay time are functions of both $α$ and $γ$⁠; the values presented in Table 1 are thus not easily interpretable in terms of the shape of a calcium transient pulse.