Preface

Automatic behavior monitoring technologies are becoming part of our everyday lives thanks to advances in sensors and machine learning. The automatic analysis and understanding of behavior are being applied to solve problems in several fields, including health care, sports, marketing, ecology, security, and psychology, to name a few. This book provides a practical introduction to machine learning methods applied to behavior analysis with the R programming language. The book does not assume any previous knowledge in machine learning. You should be familiar with the basics of R and some knowledge in basic statistics and high school-level mathematics would be beneficial.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material consists of the examples’ code and datasets. The source code for the examples can be downloaded from https://github.com/enriquegit/behavior-code. Instructions on how to set up the code and get the datasets are in Appendix A. A reference for all the utilized datasets is in Appendix B.

Conventions

DATASET names are written in uppercase italics. Functions are referred to by their name followed by parenthesis and omitting their arguments, for example: myFunction(). Class labels are written in italics and between single quotes: ‘label1’. The following icons are used to provide additional contextual information: