Quantifying similarity in animal vocal sequences: which metric performs best?

摘要

1. Many animals communicate using sequences of discrete acoustic elements which can be complex, vary in their degree of stereotypy, and are potentially open-ended. Variation in sequences can provide important ecological, behavioural or evolutionary information about the structure and connectivity of populations, mechanisms for vocal cultural evolution and the underlying drivers responsible for these processes. Various mathematical techniques have been used to forma realistic approximation of sequence similarity for such tasks.