Compression as a universal principle of animal behavior
R. Ferrer-i-Cancho, A. Hern\'andez-Fern\'andez, D. Lusseau, G., Agoramoorthy, M. J. Hsu, S. Semple

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that compression, as an information-theoretic principle, underlies animal behavior and language, showing that more frequent behaviors tend to be shorter, reflecting an efficient coding strategy across species.
Contribution
It establishes a direct link between the law of brevity and compression, providing evidence that animal and human behaviors are optimized for coding efficiency.
Findings
Words and behaviors follow Zipf's law of brevity.
Mean code length is significantly small across species.
Compression underpins behavioral efficiency in animals and humans.
Abstract
A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for a common pattern underlying diverse behavioral phenomena: words follow Zipf's law of brevity (the tendency of more frequently used words to be shorter), and conformity to this general pattern has been seen in the behavior of a number of other animals. It has been argued that the presence of this law is a sign of efficient coding in the information theoretic sense. However, no strong direct connection has been demonstrated between the law and compression, the information theoretic principle of minimizing the expected length of a code. Here we show that minimizing the expected code length implies that the length of a word cannot increase as its…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
