New formulation of the Logistic-Normal process to analyze trajectory tracking data
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Improved communication systems, shrinking battery sizes and the price drop of tracking devices have led to an increasing availability of trajectory tracking data. These data are often analyzed to understand animals behavior using mixture-type model. Due to their straightforward implementation and efficiency, hidden Markov mod- els are generally used but they are based on assumptions that are rarely verified on real data. In this work we propose a new model based on the Logistic-Normal process. Due to a new formalization and the way we specify the coregionalization matrix of the associated multivariate Gaussian process, we show that our model, differently from other proposals, is invariant with respect to the choice of the reference element and the ordering of the probability vectors components. We estimate the model under a Bayesian framework, using an approximation of the Gaussian process needed to avoid impractical computational time. After a simulation study, where we show the ability of the model to retrieve the parameters used to simulate the data, the model is applied to the real data example, that motivated this work, where a wolf is observed before and after the procreation. Results are easy interpretable showing differences in the two time windows.
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