Applications of machine learning in animal behaviour studies

In many areas of animal behaviour research, improvements in our ability to collect large and detailed data sets are outstripping our ability to analyse them. These diverse, complex and often high-dimensional data sets exhibit nonlinear dependencies and unknown interactions across multiple variables, and may fail to conform to the assumptions of many classical statistical methods. The field of machine learning provides methodologies that are ideally suited to the task of extracting knowledge from these data. In this review, we aim to introduce animal behaviourists unfamiliar with machine learning (ML) to the promise of these techniques for the analysis of complex behavioural data. We start by describing the…

• JS
  James S. McDonnell Foundation
• MR
  Medical Research Council

  Award: MR/M003906/1
• BA
  Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council

  Awards: BB/H021817/1, 630051486, BB/H021817/2, BB/H021817/1