Using Song to Identify Cassin’s Vireo Individuals. A Comparative Study of Pattern Recognition Algorithms

Arriaga, Julio G.; Sanchez, Hector; Hedley, Richard; Vallejo, Edgar E.; Taylor, Charles

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-07491-7_30

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…I recorded birds opportunistically by approaching a known breeding territory and recording the singing male until he either stopped singing or flew too far away to be recorded. In 2013, males were identified based on their association with known breeding territories, and identifications were then confirmed from recordings based on the observation that birds possess individually distinctive repertoires that are organized into diagnostic sequences [ 48 , 49 ]. In May 2014, males were captured and marked with unique colored leg bands, which helped identify the birds during subsequent recordings.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complexity, Predictability and Time Homogeneity of Syntax in the Songs of Cassin’s Vireo (Vireo cassinii)

Hedley

2016

PLoS ONE

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Many species of animals deliver vocalizations in sequences presumed to be governed by internal rules, though the nature and complexity of these syntactical rules have been investigated in relatively few species. Here I present an investigation into the song syntax of fourteen male Cassin’s Vireos (Vireo cassinii), a species whose song sequences are highly temporally structured. I compare their song sequences to three candidate models of varying levels of complexity–zero-order, first-order and second-order Markov models–and employ novel methods to interpolate between these three models. A variety of analyses, including sequence simulations, Fisher’s exact tests, and model likelihood analyses, showed that the songs of this species are too complex to be described by a zero-order or first-order Markov model. The model that best fit the data was intermediate in complexity between a first- and second-order model, though I also present evidence that some transition probabilities are conditioned on up to three preceding phrases. In addition, sequences were shown to be predictable with more than 54% accuracy overall, and predictability was positively correlated with the rate of song delivery. An assessment of the time homogeneity of syntax showed that transition probabilities between phrase types are largely stable over time, but that there was some evidence for modest changes in syntax within and between breeding seasons, a finding that I interpret to represent changes in breeding stage and social context rather than irreversible, secular shifts in syntax over time. These findings constitute a valuable addition to our understanding of bird song syntax in free-living birds, and will contribute to future attempts to understand the evolutionary importance of bird song syntax in avian communication.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complexity, Predictability and Time Homogeneity of Syntax in the Songs of Cassin’s Vireo (Vireo cassinii)

Hedley

2016

PLoS ONE

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“…In addition, we explored how different machine-learning methods can be used to maximize the accuracy of individual identification within a year and across years. In our experiments, we developed machine-learning algorithms for automated classification of Cassis's Vireo individuals that achieve > 99% accuracy, described in Arriaga et al (2013) and Arriaga et al (2014). Automated classification of the phrases themselves using different classification methods adapted from human speech processing, using data from the database, are described 130 in Tan et al (2015) and Kantapon et al (2015).…”

Section: Automated Identification Of Bird Individualsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bird-DB: A database for annotated bird song sequences

Arriaga

Cody

Vallejo

et al. 2015

Ecological Informatics

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5Projects on the acoustic monitoring of animals in natural habitats generally face the problem of managing extensive amounts of data, both needed for-and produced by-observation or experimentation. While there are many publicly accessible databases for recordings themselves, we are aware of none for annotated song sequences. In this paper, we describe our database system of bird vocalizations and introduce our online sample repository for the community of researchers studying the syntax of bird song.

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