Artificial neural network classification of Drosophila courtship song mutants

Courtship songs produced by Drosophila males — wild-type, plus the cacophony and dissonance behavioral mutants — were examined with the aid of newly developed strategies for adaptive acoustic analysis and classification. This system used several techniques involving artificial neural networks (a.k.a. parallel distributed processing), including learned vector quantization of signals and non-linear adaption (back-propagation) of data analysis. Pulse song from several individual wild-type and mutant males were first vector-quantized according to their frequency spectra. The accumulated quantized data of this kind, for a given song, were then used to teach or adapt a multiple-layered feedforward artificial neural network, which classified that song according to its original genotype. Results are presented on the performance of the final adapted system when faced with novel test data and on acoustic features the system decides upon for predicting the song-mutant genotype in question. The potential applications and extensions of this new system are discussed, including how it could be used to screen for courtship mutants, search novel behavior patterns or cause-and-effect relationships associated with reproduction, compress these kinds of data for digital storage, and analyze Drosophila behavior beyond the case of courtship song.