Finding an appropriate order for a hierarchy : a comparison of the I&SI and the BBS methods

Abstract

An important topic in the study of social behaviour of animals living in social groups is the description, analysis and explanation of dominance behaviour and relationships. Important questions in this context are (1) whether there are behaviours performed by the animals from which the existence of dyadic dominance relationships can be concluded, and (2) if dominance relationships exist, whether the set of these relationships fits a linear rank order. There are a bewildering number of methods aiming to produce a linear hierarchy from an observed dominance matrix, that is, a matrix containing the numbers of wins and losses of dyadic dominance encounters for each pair of animals. A review of most of these methods is given in de Vries (1998).