A Study of Mexican Free-Tailed Bat Chirp Syllables: Bayesian Functional Mixed Models for Nonstationary Acoustic Time Series.

ABSTRACT: We describe a new approach to analyze chirp syllables of free-tailed bats from two regions of Texas in which they are predominant: Austin and College Station. Our goal is to characterize any systematic regional differences in the mating chirps and assess whether individual bats have signature chirps. The data are analyzed by modeling spectrograms of the chirps as responses in a Bayesian functional mixed model. Given the variable chirp lengths, we compute the spectrograms on a relative time scale interpretable as the relative chirp position, using a variable window overlap based on chirp length. We use 2D wavelet transforms to capture correlation within the spectrogram in our modeling and obtain adaptive regularization of the estimates and inference for the regions-specific spectrograms. Ou

SUBMITTER: Martinez JG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3755785 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature