Of Mice and Mates: Automated Classification and Modelling of Mouse Behaviour in Groups using a Single Model across Cages
This provides biologists with tools to study temporal behavior and interactions in mice with minimal human intervention, though it is incremental as it builds on existing video analysis methods.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing mouse behavior in home-cage environments to avoid confounding factors from specialized arenas, resulting in the development of the Group Behaviour Model (GBM) that summarizes joint behavior across cages using a permutation matrix for identity matching.
Behavioural experiments often happen in specialised arenas, but this may confound the analysis. To address this issue, we provide tools to study mice in the home-cage environment, equipping biologists with the possibility to capture the temporal aspect of the individual's behaviour and model the interaction and interdependence between cage-mates with minimal human intervention. Our main contribution is the novel Group Behaviour Model (GBM) which summarises the joint behaviour of groups of mice across cages, using a permutation matrix to match the mouse identities in each cage to the model. In support of the above, we also (a) developed the Activity Labelling Module (ALM) to automatically classify mouse behaviour from video, and (b) released two datasets, ABODe for training behaviour classifiers and IMADGE for modelling behaviour.