Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 27: Transport and Anomalous Diffusion

DY 27.5: Talk

Thursday, March 29, 2012, 15:45–16:00, MA 004

Convex Hulls of Levy Walks — •Mirko Lukovic, Stephan Eule, and Theo Geisel — MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Goettingen, Germany

Recently there has been much debate in the scientific community as to whether the observed walk patterns of foraging animals are Lévy-like or not. This is mainly due to the poor accuracy of the statistical methods employed to indentify Lévy behaviour from collected data samples of animal trajectories. There are cases where strong evidence was found for Lévy walks by using an extremely large data set of animal movement (Humphries et al. Nature 2010). We propose the use of convex hulls (minimum convex polygon enclosing the recorded points (Majumdar et al. 2009)) of the home range of animals as a robust and accurate method to discriminate between different types of foraging animal motions. The method is simple and robust even in the case where data available is sparse and it should be able to determine the degree of how Lévy-like a recorded trajectory is. In addition, we do not need to know in which order the animal visited the registered points.