ANASEQ: A Pascal program to analyse lagged event sequences

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ANASEQ: A Pascal program to analyse lagged event sequences CONFERENCE PAPER · AUGUST 1985

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2 AUTHORS, INCLUDING: Jacques P. Beaugrand Université du Québec à Montréal 60 PUBLICATIONS 567 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE

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page1 ANASEQ: A Pascal program to analyse lagged event sequences

Jacques P. Beaugrand and Jean Bégin Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada) Corresponding author: [email protected]

This short note presents ANASEQ, a computer program which performs standard sequential analysis on a PC. The program described in this paper is written in Turbo Pascal 5.5 (Borland International) for the IBM XT/AT family of computers and can be easily adapted for other personal computers. ANASEQ is designed to analyse event sequences. The flow of behaviour has to be represented as a chain of alphabetically coded events. We have chosen as an example the courting male pigeon, as in «Bows Drives Preens Bills Mounts» where each mnemonic stands for a discrete event or state. The program is not designed to treat temporal intervals and durations; thus time markers must not be present in the corpus of data. For a specified lag, the program computes unit frequencies, joint frequencies, transitional probabilities, and Z scores (Allison & Liker, 1982) comparing each transitional probability with its expected value. This is done for all possible pairs of codes which were found in the corpus. The program computes Z-scores as if auto-transitions were possible. As illustrated in Appendix A, each case read by ANASEQ must be composed of an identification line followed by a sequence (or sentence) spread over one or more lines, each line having a maximum of 80 characters. The whole sentence must be terminated by a punctuation mark. The case corresponds to the basic unit of analysis and the sequence or sentence is the chain of codes derived from observing that case which typically would be a specific pair of individuals

page2 interacting. ANASEQ computes lag sequential statistics based on all cases which it finds in the file specified by the user. To obtain case-by-case analyses, one has to submit each case separately as distinct files. So, on a PC, the editing work of partitioning or grouping cases can be easily done with any DOS «text only» editor. Upon execution, ANASEQ asks for (1) the DOS prefix name of the file containing the case(s) to be analyzed and (2) for the lag requested (any length, limited only by the user's data). The input data file must have the extension «DAT». The results of the analysis are written to a disk file having the same prefix as the input file but the extension «Ln», where n is a two digit number which corresponds to the requested lag (e.g. «Pigeon.L01» for lag 1). The output file can be easily text-edited or imported into a database or spreadsheet. An example of application of ANASEQ is given in Appendix A. We have generated a corpus containing 10 male pigeon courtship sequences respecting, in terms of transition probabilities, Fabricius & Jansson's (1963) original transition matrix between pairs of behaviour in the courting male. Auto-transitions were not allowed, the original matrix having zeros in all cells of the diagonal. Each behavioural sentence simulated had to start with a Bow and had to conclude with a Copulation. Ten sentences thus generated are presented in file «PIGEON.DAT». File «PIGEON.L01» created by ANASEQ contains the results of the lag 1 sequential analysis of the 10 courtship sentences. File «PIGEON.L03» contains corresponding results for a lag 3.

page3 REFERENCES ALLISON, P.D. & LIKER, J.K. (1982). Analyzing sequential categorical data on dyadic interaction: A comment on Gottman. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 393-403. BAKEMAN, R. (1983). Computing lag sequential statistics: The ELAG program. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 15, 530-535. FABRICIUS, E. & JANSSON, A. (1963). Laboratory observations on the reproductive behaviour of the pigeon (Columba livia) during the pre-incubation phase of the breeding cycle. Animal Behaviour, 11, 534-547. SACKET, G.P, HOLM, R., CROWLEY, C., & HENKINS, A.A. (1979). A FORTRAN program for lag sequential analysis of contingency and cyclicity in behavioral interaction data. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 11, 366-378.

page4

APPENDIX A Ten simulated sentences respecting (in terms of transition probabilities) Fabricius & Jansson's (1963) original data on the courting behaviour of the male pigeon. This file is given as input to ANASEQ in order to perform sequential analysis. BW: Bowing, DR: Driving, A: Attacking, D: Displacement preening, BI: Billing, M: Mounting, CO: Copulation. Input Data file «PIGEON.DAT» #1 BW D BI D M CO. #2 BW DR BW DR BW A BW D BI D BI D BW DR BW D BI D BI D BI D BI D BI D BI D BI M CO. #3 BW DR BW DR BW DR BW DR BW D M CO. #4 BW DR BW A BW DR BW DR BW A BW D BI D BI D BI D BI BW DR BW D BI D BI M CO. #5 BW D M CO. #6 BW D BI D BI M CO. #7 BW DR BW DR BW DR BW DR BW D BI M CO. #8 BW D BI D BI D BI D M CO. #9 BW D BI D M CO. #10 BW DR BW DR BW DR BW DR BW D M CO.

page5 Results for lag 1. Absolute frequencies, percentages and corresponding Z scores are outputted for the requested lag. Output File «PIGEON.L01»

--->>> Absolute frequencies for Lag 1 Percentages Z Scores Absolute frequencies for Lag 3 Percentages Z Scores 1 Then For K:=2 to L do

page9 SS[K-1]:=SS[K]; SS[L]:=TT; End; ReadLn(G); Until eof(G); Close(G); End; Procedure Ecriture (F: Nom; L, M: Integer; V: Vst; U: Vec; A: Mat); Var I, J, II, JJ: Integer; R,C: Array[1..150] of LongInt; VV: Vst; Vn: Vec; W, WW: LongInt; E: Real; G: Text; S: Nom; Begin Str(L,S); If L0 Then Write(G,100*(A[I,J]/R[I]):10:4) Else Write(G,0.0:10:4); End; Writeln(G,100*(R[I]/W):12:4); End; WriteLn(G); WriteLn(G,'--->>> Z Scores Scores Z