Robust classification of animal tracking data

This paper describes an application of the K-means classification algorithm to categorize animal tracking data into various classes of behavior. It was found that, even without explicit consideration of biological factors, the clustering algorithm repeatably resolved tracking data from cows into two groups corresponding to active and inactive periods. Furthermore, it is shown that this classification is robust to a large range of data sampling intervals. An adaptive data sampling algorithm is suggested for improving the efficiency of both energy and memory usage in animal tracking equipment. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.