A Reductionist Approach to Hypothesis-Catching for the Analysis of Self-Organizing Decision-Making Systems

A difficulty in analyzing self-organizing decision-making systems is their high dimensionality which needs to be reduced to allow for deep insights. Following the hypothesis that such a dimensionality reduction can only be usefully determined in an act of a low-scale scientific discovery, a recipe for a data-driven, iterative process for determining, testing, and refining hypotheses about how the system operates is presented. This recipe relies on the definition of Markov chains and their analysis based on an urn model. Positive and negative feedback loops operating on global features of the system are detected by this analysis. The workflow of this analysis process is shown in two case studies investigating the BEECLUST algorithm and collective motion in locusts. The reported recipe has the potential to be generally applicable to self-organizing collective systems and is efficient due to an incremental approach.