B0808
Title: Detecting changes in dynamic social networks based on unlabeled movement data
Authors: Henry Scharf - San Diego State University (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: The social structure of a population can often influence movement and inform researchers on a species' behavioral tendencies. Social networks can be studied through movement data; however, modern sources of data can have complex patterns of missingness that are not straightforward to address using existing methods. For example, drone-gathered observations of trajectories, while highly precise, can introduce labeling issues when individuals in a study population move in and out of the camera's active field of view. When individuals cannot be uniquely identified visually, multiple labels may be assigned to a single individual. Since all available social movement models rely on unique identification of all individuals in the population, we extend an existing Bayesian hierarchical movement model that makes use of a latent social network to accommodate ``multiply-labeled'' movement data. We apply our model to drone-gathered observations of dolphins to study the effect of sonar exposure on the dolphins social structure. Our proposed framework can be applied to all unlabeled movement data for various social movement applications and has potential implications for the study of privacy-protected movement data.
