Department of Military and Emergency Medicine, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD, USA,
Cogn Neurodyn. 2007 Dec;1(4):287-93. doi: 10.1007/s11571-007-9027-8. Epub 2007 Oct 16.
The simplest approach to quantifying animal behavior begins by identifying a list of discrete behaviors and observing the animal's behavior at regular intervals for a specified period of time. The behavioral distribution (the fraction of observations corresponding to each behavior) is then determined. This is an incomplete characterization of behavior, and in some instances, mild injury is not reflected by statistically significant changes in the distribution even though a human observer can confidently and correctly assert that the animal is not behaving normally. In these circumstances, an examination of the sequential structure of the animal's behavior may, however, show significant alteration. This contribution describes procedures derived from symbolic dynamics for quantifying the sequential structure of animal behavior. Normalization procedures for complexity estimates are presented, and the limitations of complexity measures are discussed.
量化动物行为最简单的方法是首先确定一系列离散的行为，并在指定的时间间隔内定期观察动物的行为。然后确定行为分布（与每种行为相对应的观察次数的分数）。这只是对行为的不完全描述，在某些情况下，即使人类观察者可以有信心和正确地断言动物的行为不正常，但轻微的伤害也不会反映在行为分布的统计学显著变化中。在这些情况下，然而，对动物行为的顺序结构的检查可能会显示出显著的变化。本贡献描述了从符号动力学中得出的用于量化动物行为顺序结构的程序。提出了复杂度估计的归一化程序，并讨论了复杂度度量的局限性。
