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Background Animal-borne data loggers today often house several sensors recording simultaneously at high frequency. This offers opportunities to gain fine-scale insights into behaviour from individual-sensor as well as integrated multi-sensor data. In the context of behaviour recognition, even though accelerometers have been used extensively, magnetometers have recently been shown to detect specific behaviours that accelerometers miss. The prevalent constraint of limited training data necessitates the importance of identifying behaviours with high robustness to data from new individuals, and may require fusing data from both these sensors. However, no study yet has developed an end-to-end approach to recognise common animal behaviours such as foraging, locomotion, and resting from magnetometer data in a common classification framework capable of accommodating and comparing data from both sensors. Methods We address this by first leveraging magnetometers’ similarity to accelerometers to develop biomechanical descriptors of movement: we use the static component given by sensor tilt with respect to Earth’s local magnetic field to estimate posture, and the dynamic component given by change in sensor tilt with time to characterise movement intensity and periodicity. We use these descriptors within an existing hybrid scheme that combines biomechanics and machine learning to recognise behaviour. We showcase the utility of our method on triaxial magnetometer data collected on ten wild Kalahari meerkats (Suricata suricatta), with annotated video recordings of each individual serving as groundtruth. Finally, we compare our results with accelerometer-based behaviour recognition. Results The overall recognition accuracy of > 94% obtained with magnetometer data was found to be comparable to that achieved using accelerometer data. Interestingly, higher robustness to inter-individual variability in dynamic behaviour was achieved with the magnetometer, while the accelerometer was better at estimating posture. Conclusions Magnetometers were found to accurately identify common behaviours, and were particularly robust to dynamic behaviour recognition. The use of biomechanical considerations to summarise magnetometer data makes the hybrid scheme capable of accommodating data from either or both sensors within the same framework according to each sensor’s strengths. This provides future studies with a method to assess the added benefit of using magnetometers for behaviour recognition. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s40462-019-0172-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Data from animal‐borne inertial sensors are widely used to investigate several aspects of an animal's life, such as energy expenditure, daily activity patterns and behaviour. Accelerometer data used in conjunction with machine learning algorithms have been the tool of choice for characterising animal behaviour. Although machine learning models perform reasonably well, they may not rely on meaningful features, nor lend themselves to physical interpretation of the classification rules. This lack of interpretability and control over classification outcomes is of particular concern where different behaviours have different frequency of occurrence and duration, as in most natural systems, and calls for the development of alternative methods. Biomechanical approaches to human activity classification could overcome these shortcomings, yet their full potential remains untapped for animal studies. We propose a general framework for behaviour recognition using accelerometers, and develop a hybrid model where (a) biomechanical features characterise movement dynamics, and (b) a node‐based hierarchical classification scheme employs simple machine learning algorithms at each node to find feature‐value thresholds separating different behaviours. Using triaxial accelerometer data collected on 10 wild Kalahari meerkats, and annotated video recordings of each individual as groundtruth, this hybrid model was validated in three scenarios: (a) when each behaviour was equally represented (EQDIST), (b) when naturally imbalanced datasets were considered (STRAT) and (c) when data from new individuals were considered (LOIO). A linear‐kernel Support Vector Machine at each node of our classification scheme yielded an overall accuracy of >95% for each scenario. Our hybrid approach had a 2.7% better average overall accuracy than top‐performing classical machine learning approaches. Further, we showed that not all models with high overall accuracy returned accurate behaviour‐specific performance, and good performance during EQDIST did not always generalise to STRAT and LOIO. Our hybrid model took advantage of robust machine learning algorithms for automatically estimating decision boundaries between behavioural classes. This not only achieved high classification performance but also permitted biomechanical interpretation of classification outcomes. The framework presented here provides the flexibility to adapt models to required levels of behavioural resolution, and has the potential to facilitate meaningful model sharing between studies.