A Semi-Supervised Pipeline for Generalized Behavior Discovery from Animal-Borne Motion Time Series

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-supervised pipeline that effectively discovers and identifies novel animal behaviors from motion sensor data, even with limited labels and highly imbalanced classes, using a novel containment score.

Contribution

It proposes a KDE + HDR containment score for interpretable novelty detection in behavior discovery from ecological motion data.

Findings

Successfully detects novel behaviors with low overlap scores.

The containment score effectively flags true novel behaviors.

Method outperforms baseline clustering approaches in ecological datasets.

Abstract

Learning behavioral taxonomies from animal-borne sensors is challenging because labels are scarce, classes are highly imbalanced, and behaviors may be absent from the annotated set. We study generalized behavior discovery in short multivariate motion snippets from gulls, where each sample is a sequence with 3-axis IMU acceleration (20 Hz) and GPS speed, spanning nine expert-annotated behavior categories. We propose a semi-supervised discovery pipeline that (i) learns an embedding function from the labeled subset, (ii) performs label-guided clustering over embeddings of both labeled and unlabeled samples to form candidate behavior groups, and (iii) decides whether a discovered group is truly novel using a containment score. Our key contribution is a KDE + HDR (highest-density region) containment score that measures how much a discovered cluster distribution is contained within, or contains, each known-class distribution; the best-match containment score serves as an interpretable novelty statistic. In experiments where an entire behavior is withheld from supervision and appears only in the unlabeled pool, the method recovers a distinct cluster and the containment score flags novelty via low overlap, while a negative-control setting with no novel behavior yields consistently higher overlaps. These results suggest that HDR-based containment provides a practical, quantitative test for generalized class discovery in ecological motion time series under limited annotation and severe class imbalance.