Complexity in Animal Communication: Estimating the Size of N-Gram Structures

Entropy

关键词: animal communication;    information theory;    dolphin;    humpback whale;    bird song;    phonology;   

DOI  :  10.3390/e16010526

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

In this paper, new techniques that allow conditional entropy to estimate the combinatorics of symbols are applied to animal communication studies to estimate the communication’s repertoire size. By using the conditional entropy estimates at multiple orders, the paper estimates the total repertoire sizes for animal communication across bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales and several species of birds for an N-gram length of one to three. In addition to discussing the impact of this method on studies of animal communication complexity, the reliability of these estimates is compared to other methods through simulation. While entropy does undercount the total repertoire size due to rare N-grams, it gives a more accurate picture of the most frequently used repertoire than just repertoire size alone.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland