Using Data-Compressors for Classification Hunting Behavioral Sequences in Rodents as “Ethological Texts”

One of the main problems in comparative studying animal behavior is searching for an adequate mathematical method for evaluating the similarities and differences between behavioral patterns. This study aims to propose a new tool to evaluate ethological differences between species. We developed the new compression-based method for the homogeneity testing and classification to investigate hunting behavior of small mammals. A distinction of this approach is that it belongs to the framework of mathematical statistics and allows one to compare the structural characteristics of any texts in pairwise comparisons. To validate a new method, we compared the hunting behaviors of different species of small mammals as ethological “texts.” To do this, we coded behavioral elements with different letters. We then tested the hypothesis whether the behavioral sequences of different species as “texts” are generated either by a single source or by different ones. Based on association coefficients obtained from pairwise comparisons, we built a new classification of types of hunting behaviors, which brought a unique insight into how particular elements of hunting behavior in rodents changed and evolved. We suggest the compression-based method for homogeneity testing as a relevant tool for behavioral and evolutionary analysis.

[1]  Simon Gadbois,et al.  Revisiting the concept of behavior patterns in animal behavior with an example from food-caching sequences in Wolves (Canis lupus), Coyotes (Canis latrans), and Red Foxes (Vulpes vulpes) , 2015, Behavioural Processes.

[2]  Andrew A. Biewener,et al.  Unpredictability of escape trajectory explains predator evasion ability and microhabitat preference of desert rodents , 2017, Nature Communications.

[3]  Paul M. B. Vitányi,et al.  Clustering by compression , 2003, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[4]  Dirk U. Pfeiffer,et al.  Recent advances in the analysis of behavioural organization and interpretation as indicators of animal welfare , 2009, Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

[5]  Daniel A. Braun,et al.  Assessing randomness and complexity in human motion trajectories through analysis of symbolic sequences , 2014, Front. Hum. Neurosci..

[6]  Chaorong Li,et al.  Triangular and Fibonacci Number Patterns Driven by Stress on Core/Shell Microstructures , 2005, Science.

[7]  Boris Ryabko,et al.  Studying hunting behaviour in the striped field mouse using data compression , 2017, acta ethologica.

[8]  Alexey S. Matveev,et al.  Using the Data-Compression Method for Studying Hunting Behavior in Small Mammals , 2019, Entropy.

[9]  Z. Reznikova,et al.  Experimental Comparative Analysis of Hunting Behavior in Four Species of Cricetinae Hamsters , 2019, Biology Bulletin.

[10]  Jeffrey Scott Vitter,et al.  Efficient Compression and Indexing for Highly Repetitive DNA Sequence Collections , 2021, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

[11]  Maurizio Casarrubea,et al.  Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Data in the Study of Feeding Behavior in Male Wistar Rats , 2019, Front. Psychol..

[12]  H. Japyassú,et al.  The evolution of behavioural systems: a study of grooming in rodents , 2013 .

[13]  Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho,et al.  Acoustic sequences in non‐human animals: a tutorial review and prospectus , 2016, Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

[14]  Tsutomu Takagi,et al.  Employing Relative Entropy Techniques for Assessing Modifications in Animal Behavior , 2011, PloS one.

[15]  Boris Ryabko,et al.  Using Ideas of Kolmogorov Complexity for Studying Biological Texts , 2012, Theory of Computing Systems.

[16]  Bin Ma,et al.  The similarity metric , 2001, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[17]  G. Forrester.  A multidimensional approach to investigations of behaviour: revealing structure in animal communication signals , 2008, Animal Behaviour.

[18]  Shuigeng Zhou,et al.  Similarity evaluation of DNA sequences based on frequent patterns and entropy , 2015, BMC Genomics.

[19]  Boris Ryabko,et al.  Using data-compressors for statistical analysis of problems on homogeneity testing and classification , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT).

[20]  Ian Q Whishaw,et al.  The syntactic organization of pasta-eating and the structure of reach movements in the head-fixed mouse , 2017, Scientific Reports.

[21]  Hector Zenil,et al.  Algorithmic complexity for psychology: a user-friendly implementation of the coding theorem method , 2016, Behavior research methods.