A stochastic model of social interaction in wild house mice

TL;DR

This paper presents a stochastic Markov chain model to simulate and analyze the social interaction dynamics of wild house mice within their environment, capturing key behavioral features with potential for further refinement.

Contribution

It introduces a simple stochastic model for mouse social interactions and demonstrates its ability to replicate important behavioral features from empirical data.

Findings

Model reproduces key behavioral features

Simplified stochastic approach is effective

Discussion of potential model improvements

Abstract

We investigate to what extent the interaction dynamics of a population of wild house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus) in their environment can be explained by a simple stochastic model. We use a Markov chain model to describe the transitions of mice in a discrete space of nestboxes, and implement a multi-agent simulation of the model. We find that some important features of our behavioural dataset can be reproduced using this simplified stochastic representation, and discuss the improvements that could be made to our model in order to increase the accuracy of its predictions. Our findings have implications for the understanding of the complexity underlying social behaviour in the animal kingdom and the cognitive requirements of such behaviour.