Mining Massive Archives of Mice Sounds with Symbolized Representations

Many animals produce long sequences of vocalizations best described as “songs.” In some animals, such as crickets and frogs, these songs are relatively simple and repetitive chirps or trills. However, animals as diverse as whales, bats, birds and even the humble mice considered here produce intricate and complex songs. These songs are worthy of study in their own right. For example, the study of bird songs has helped to cast light on various questions in the nature vs. nurture debate. However, there is a particular reason why the study of mice songs can benefit mankind. The house mouse (Mus musculus) has long been an important model organism in biology and medicine, and it is by far the most commonly used genetically altered laboratory mammal to address human diseases. While there has been significant recent efforts to analyze mice songs, advances in sensor technology have created a situation where our ability to collect data far outstrips our ability to analyze it. In this work we argue that the time is ripe for archives of mice songs to fall into the purview of data mining. We show a novel technique for mining mice vocalizations directly in the visual (spectrogram) space that practitioners currently use. Working in this space allows us to bring an arsenal of data mining tools to bear on this important domain, including similarity search, classification, motif discovery and contrast set mining.