Determining which statistical methods are appropriate for data is both user and data dependent and prone to change as new methodology becomes available. This process encompasses model ideation, model selection, and determining appropriate use of statistical methods. Literature on models for animal movement emerging in the past two decades has yielded a rich collection of statistical methods garnering much deserved positive attention. Among such efforts, there is limited investigation of the broader place for simple machine learning methodology in animal movement modeling. We propose a bagged (i.e., bootstrap aggregated) animal movement model using simple, off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms. The model is intuitive, retains statistical inference about characteristics of animal movement (i.e., estimated from model-based summary statistics), and only requires knowledge of elementary statistical and machine learning analysis to understand. We show by simulation that our model can provide unbiased estimates of pertinent characteristics of animal movement (e.g., daily displacement) in the presence of large and realistic location error. We believe that increasing accessible literature on simple machine learning animal movement models provides valuable pedagogical and practical support for researchers using statistical models to study animal movement.

The collection of animal position data via GPS tracking devices has increased in quality and usage in recent years. Animal position and movement, although measured discretely, follows the same principles of kinematic motion, and as such, the process is inherently continuous and differentiable. I demonstrate the functionality and visual elegance of smoothing spline models. I discuss the challenges and benefits of implementing such an approach, and I provide an analysis of movement and social interaction of seven jaguars inhabiting the Taiamã Ecological Station, Pantanal, Brazil. In the analysis, I derive measures for pairwise distance, cooccurence and spatiotemporal associaton between jaguars, borrowing ideas from density estimation and information theory. These measures are feasible as a result of spline model estimation, and they provide a critical tool for a deeper investigation of cooccurence duration, frequency, and localized spatio-temporal relationships between animals.