Six steps to using machine learning for animal behavior research

Just a few years ago, Nastacia Goodwin spent most days sitting at a computer in a lab at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, stopwatch in hand, eyes fixed on three-hour long videos of prairie voles. Whenever an animal huddled close to another -- click -- she recorded the duration of their interaction. It didn't take long before Goodwin, now a graduate student in Sam Golden's research group at the University of Washington in Seattle, became eager to find a faster, less biased way to annotate videos. Machine learning was a logical choice. Goodwin co-developed Simple Behavioral Analysis, or SimBA, an open-source tool to automatically detect and classify animal behaviors from videos.