MODELING MEMORY IN COAL TITS - AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE EM ALGORITHM

Some species of birds are known to use memory to retrieve previously s tored food. A series of experiments on one of those species, coal tits , investigated various aspects of such memory. For one particular expe riment, a number of statistical models describing the memory were fitt ed. However, some of the data were unavoidably incomplete. The expecta tion maximization (EM) algorithm provides a means of incorporating the incomplete data into the fitting procedure.