Modeling Interdependent Animal Movement in Continuous Time

Summary This article presents a new approach to modeling group animal movement in continuous time. The movement of a group of animals is modeled as a multivariate Ornstein Uhlenbeck diffusion process in a high-dimensional space. Each individual of the group is attracted to a leading point which is g...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biometrics
Main Authors: Niu, Mu, Blackwell, Paul G., Skarin, Anna
Other Authors: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Oxford University Press (OUP) 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/biom.12454
https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fbiom.12454
https://academic.oup.com/biometrics/article-pdf/72/2/315/55173259/biometrics_72_2_315.pdf
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Summary:Summary This article presents a new approach to modeling group animal movement in continuous time. The movement of a group of animals is modeled as a multivariate Ornstein Uhlenbeck diffusion process in a high-dimensional space. Each individual of the group is attracted to a leading point which is generally unobserved, and the movement of the leading point is also an Ornstein Uhlenbeck process attracted to an unknown attractor. The Ornstein Uhlenbeck bridge is applied to reconstruct the location of the leading point. All movement parameters are estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, specifically a Metropolis Hastings algorithm. We apply the method to a small group of simultaneously tracked reindeer, Rangifer tarandus tarandus, showing that the method detects dependency in movement between individuals.