Collective dynamics and model verification: Connecting kinetic modeling to data

Modeling the zebrafish animal model

Maurizio Porfiri

New York University
[SLIDES]

Zebrafish is a popular laboratory animal species for the investigation of several functional and dysfunctional biological processes. Mathematical models of zebrafish behavior are expected to considerably aid in the design of hypothesis-driven studies by enabling preliminary in silico tests and refine available datasets. By using experimental data on zebrafish locomotion, we establish a stochastic mean reverting jump diffusion model to describe their burst-and-coast swimming style. Such a data-driven framework is ultimately integrated in two models of social behavior to understand the effect of sudden large deviations of individuals’ turn rate on the group coordination.