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Bout duration distributions in animals
Pranav Minasandra

Details

The analyses in this code forms the basis of our pre-print, 'Behavioral sequences across multiple animal species in the wild share common structural features'.

People who worked actively on this code

Pranav Minasandra

People who performed a code review

Katrina Brock and Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin

People whose contributions were necessary for this project to get going

Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin, Emily Grout, Katrina Brock, Meg Crofoot, Vlad Demartsev, Andy Gersick, Ben Hirsch, Kay Holekamp, Lily Johnson-Ulrich, Amlan Nayak, Josue Ortega, Marie Roch, Eli Strauss, Marta Manser, Frants Jensen, Baptiste Averly, and many others

Overview

This project ties together results from behavioural classifiers built using hyenas, meerkats, coatis. Here, I find patterns in behavior dynamics for all classified behaviours for each individual of each species. This project stems from my serendipitous discovery of heavy-tailed bout duration distributions in spotted hyenas in 2019.

Heavy-tailed distributions of bout durations could imply that self-reinforcement plays a role in behavioural dynamics at the fine scale: such distributions have decreasing associated hazard rates, which means that the longer the animal is in a behavioural state, the less likely it becomes to exit that behaviour in the next instant. This discovery implies that wildly different mammals have decreasing hazard rates for all behavioural states. We also show that all bout duration distributions are near power-law or truncated power-law types. Furthermore, we show that the memory of a time-series of behavior decays as a power-law up to a point (around 1000-3000 s), after which it changes to a more typical exponential decay. We show this in many different ways (check out our pre-print above!)

We use the module powerlaw for most fitting. Hazard functions are estimated by our code based on the definition of a hazard function. Data for this project comes from the Communication and Coordination Across Scales interdisciplinary group.

Dependencies and prerequisites

This software has been written in python 3.10 on and for a Linux operating system. You will not need expensive supercomputers to run this code, it should work on any personal computer (tested on i7-11th Gen, 16G RAM). I have tried to make this as OS-agnostic and IDE-agnostic as possible, so you should be able to run this on any computer directly.

Below are details about how to install and run this software

Pre-requisite software

The following packages have to be installed separately:

  • matplotlib
  • numpy
  • pandas
  • powerlaw
  • scikit-learn (for metrics)
  • scipy
  • nolds (for DFA)

Installation and setup

NOTE: On Linux and (possibly Mac), several below steps are automated by running the following command.:

curl -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pminasandra/bout-duration-distributions/master/setup.sh | bash

It might fail if your version of pip is old; so try updating that if there is a pip related error. If you have run the above command, skip straight to step 5.

  1. create a project directory at a location of your choice and enter it
mkdir /path/to/your/project
cd /path/to/your/project
  1. Download the contents of this repository using

git clone https://github.com/pminasandra/bout-duration-distributions code

  1. Also create the Data and Figures directories
mkdir Data
mkdir Figures
  1. In the code/ directory, create a file called 'cwd.txt' that, on the very first line, has the content /path/to/your/project

You can do this in linux-like command lines like this:

echo $PWD > code/cwd.txt
  1. After this, copy any behaviour sequence data folders into the Data/ folder.

Usage

Run all indicated python scripts using a terminal, with the command python3 <script_name>.py

Analyses are to be done as follows:

  • Running python code/pkgnametbd/fitting.py generates all bout duration distributions and generates tables containing AIC values.
  • Running python code/pkgnametbd/survival.py creates plots with the hazard functions for all behaviours.
  • Running python code/pkgnametbd/persistence.py performs DFA and mutual information decay analyses.
  • Running python code/pkgnametbd/simulate.py runs all simulations mentioned in the paper and its appendices.

For academic colleagues, it is easy to re-work this code in your own analyses. Most functions also come with helpful docstrings, and the overall code structure is modular and intuitive. If you are familiar with basic python, the only additional thing you need to know is about generators, a python object that is not commonly used, but speeds up work tremendously in our case. Useful classes are provided by simulations/agentpool.py and simulations/simulator.py, and generally helpful functions are found in boutparsing.py and fitting.py.