Bat Call Identification with Gaussian Process Multinomial Probit Regression and a Dynamic Time Warping Kernel

We study the problem of identifying bat species from echolocation calls in order to build automated bioacoustic monitoring algorithms. We employ the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm which has been successfully applied for bird flight calls identification and show that classification performance is superior to hand crafted call shape parameters used in previous research. This highlights that generic bioacoustic software with good classification rates can be constructed with little domain knowledge. We conduct a study with field data of 21 bat species from the north and central Mexico using a multinomial probit regression model with Gaussian process prior and a full EP approximation of the posterior of latent function values. Results indicate high classification accuracy across almost all classes while misclassification rate across families of species is low highlighting the common evolutionary path of echolocation in bats.