Traits of Leaders in Movement Initiation: Classification and Identification

How do leaders lead and what aspects of the leader’s identity make others agree to follow? Are the individuals with influence always at the front of their group? Do they initiate travel in new directions or are they just the first ones to start moving? Which attempts to initiate movement translate to leadership? In this paper we present a computational method to characterize and classify the types of leaders in movement initiation. We adapt a leadership inference framework, FLICA, to extract information about which individuals act as leaders. We then propose a framework for ranking leaders according to their position, velocity, and heading, relative to the group, and perform leadership model classification based on those traits, as well as perform hypothesis testing of correlations between target features and leadership ranking. We use simulation datasets to demonstrate the robustness of framework performance w.r.t. noise in model classification. We use time series of GPS positions of wild olive baboons (Papio anubis) and time series of a school of fish movement (Notemigonus crysoleucas) to illustrate applications of our approach. Our results demonstrate that our proposed framework is robust to noise w.r.t. the task of model classification of trait leadership. In baboons, our approach shows that while leaders may not be the first to move, they are typically at the front and move in a new area with everybody immediately aligning in the direction of the leader. On the contrary, in a school of fish, high-rank individuals move earlier to new areas, and the group aligns its direction following these individuals quickly. Our simple scheme is flexible to be applied to other datasets and sets of traits to characterize leadership.