Modelling and Inference for the Movement of Interacting Individuals

This project will look at continuous-time movement models for multiple tracked wild animals, e.g. using GPS, where tracking overlaps in time, allowing inference about interactions between individuals. The emphasis is likely to be on relatively small numbers of individuals. A key tool will be a recently developed inference technique for state-switching diffusion models - representing movement and behaviour - where the probabilities of switching between states depend on location. The method, known as "uniformization", is based on relating the process of interest to a well-understood simpler process which is uniform in space. The project will extend this methodology by looking at diffusion in a higher-dimensional space, to represent multiple individuals simultaneously, and at state-spaces with more complex structure, to represent more sophisticated behaviour. Algorithms to speed up the fitting of these models will also be developed. There are no formal external partners, but there is informal collaboration with ecologists at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, including access to GPS data on wild boar.