Implications of hierarchical Markov models of behavior: on irreversibility, predictability, and dimensionality (opens in new tab)

The maturation of quantitative tools for studying the high-level structure of animal behavior, and especially tools which represent spontaneous behavior as a sequence of stereotyped and neurally well-defined 'syllables', demands that the field revisit a fundamental theoretical question: if the coarse structure of behavior can be accurately described by Markov models, what do these models really tell us about behavior? In this work, we explore th...