Segmentation

After filling the data input section of the program (Paths & Files Format, Experiment Settings and Experiment Properties) the user is able to proceed to the Segmentation process.

Contents

1. Segmentation Overview
2. The Segmentation Panel

### Segmentation Overview ### As described in the [publication](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep14562), compared to previous approaches that attempted to categorise the behaviour of animals by using the whole swimming paths, this approach first splits the animal trajectory inside the Morris Water Maze into segments and then tries to classify each one of them. In that way the difficulty of classifying long animal trajectories exhibiting many different kinds of behaviour is overcome.

The segmentation process works as follows: each trajectory is divided into N segments of length d. Each segment overlaps with previous segments (by an h percentage) to reduce the classification variance due to unfavourable segmentations.

### The Segmentation Panel ###

• Segmentation Length: Specifies the length d of the segments (small variations may apply due to the the discrete nature and spacing of available data points).

• Segment Overlap: Specifies the percentage of overlap (h) between the segments. h needs to be positive and less or equal to 1.

• Segmentation (Button): If the above information (including the data input section of the program) is provided correctly then the program reads the animal trajectories and segments them. Moreover, it computes the features of the trajectories and the segments. When the process is finished all the values are stored inside an object called segmentation_configs_#id which is stored inside the specified Output Folder.

- **Segment Configuration Object path** This textfield shows the full path of the *segmentation\_configs\_#id* object created from the segmentation process. This will be the default object for the rest of the program. If the user wants to use another segmentation object then he needs to specify its path here. *Note: the generated id has the following format DATE (yyyy-mm-dd) & TIME (hh-mm), for example segmentation\_configs\_2016-07-13-17-45 means the segmentation object created on 13/July/2016 at 17:45*