Mining Common Spatial-temporal Periodic Patterns of Animal Movement

Advanced satellite tracking technologies enable biologists to track animal movements at finer spatial and temporal scales. The resulting long-term movement data is very meaningful for understanding animal activities. Periodic pattern analysis can provide insightful approach to reveal animal activity patterns. However, individual GPS data is usually incomplete and in limited lifespan. In addition, individual periodic behaviors are inherently complicated with many uncertainties. In this paper, we address the problem of mining periodic patterns of animal movements by combining multiple individuals with similar periodicities. We formally define the problem of mining common periodicity and propose a novel periodicity measure. We introduce the information entropy in the proposed measure to detect common period. Data incompleteness, noises, and ambiguity of individual periodicity are considered in our method. Furthermore, we mine multiple common periodic patterns by grouping periodic segments w.r.t. the detected period, and provide a visualization method of common periodic patterns by designing a cyclical filled line chart. To assess effectiveness of our proposed method, we provide an experimental study using a real GPS dataset collected on 29 birds in Qinghai Lake, China.