Masters Oral Defense: "Bayesian Classification Methods for Bat Call Identification"

Abstract: Bat call classification is widely used in bat population monitoring in the field of ecology. Since bat populations are susceptible to changes in their surroundings, it is essential to monitor bat populations for purposes of bat protection and bio-environment protection. The purpose of this thesis is to compare the performance of several classification methods applied to a data set extracted from audio recordings for different species of bats in Mexico. The methods under comparison are (i) a nonparametric Bayesian approach using a multinomial probit model with Gaussian process prior; (ii) support vector machines (SVM); naive Bayes; and (iv) Bayesian additive regression trees (BART). We find that BART achieves the lowest classification error rate.

Hosts: Nan Lin & Todd Kuffner