Topological Data Analysis of C. elegans Locomotion and Behavior
Ashleigh Thomas, Kathleen Bates, Alex Elchesen, Iryna Hartsock, Hang Lu, Peter Bubenik · Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · 2021
, a widely studied model organism in biology. In particular, we use topology to produce a quantitative summary of complex behavior which may be applied to high-throughput data. Our methods allow us to distinguish and classify videos from various environmental conditions and we analyze the trade-off between accuracy and interpretability. Furthermore, we present a novel technique for visualizing the outputs of our analysis in terms of the input. Specifically, we use representative cycles of persistent homology to produce synthetic videos of stereotypical behaviors.