Statistical Modeling of Social Dominance Interactions

We are interested in applying statistical methods to the study of aggressive social interactions. In one study, we developed methods for determining from all occurrence behavioral data when pairs of mice resolve their dominant-subordinate relationship. In the image you can see when individuals exhibit dominant (red) or subordinate (blue) behavior towards each other over sessions of 20 minutes across five days. We applied Kleinberg’s burst detection algorithm to identify individual bursts of aggression and/or subordination. Within each burst we determined if animals could be described as dominant or subordinate using phi-coefficients. This allowed us to temporally plot the emergence of dominant-subordinate relationships. We also examined Markov transitions and adapted pairwise-correlation methods to assess how dominant and subordinate animals dissociate as relationships resolve in terms of their sequential patterns of social behavior.