Comparing Models of Pea Aphid Aggregation with Topological Data Analysis

Nilsen et al. 2013 presents experimental data of pea aphid movement and proposes two models to simulate aphid behavior: one which assumes interaction among neighboring aphids and one which assumes no interaction. We use tools from topological data analysis to examine the ability of the models to approximate the experimental data. Our data consists of aphid movement over time. Using a topological invariant, we measure the clustering of aphids on different scales. We use contour plots to observe change in clustering over scale and time for experimental and simulated data. We compare these plots to measure model fitness