DYNABEE: : Dynamical Systems for Modeling Honey Bee Colony Behavior

Given sparse and noisy measurements, how can we model, forecast, understand the colony behavior? Domain experts strictly demand that the method is explainable, fast, and accurate. We propose DYNABEE, which consists of a carefully designed dynamical system of differential equations, along with their stability analysis. We developed the equations from first principles, in close collaboration with entomologists. As a result, DYNABEE has only few, perfectly interpretable parameters to fit (foraging rate, mortality rate, etc). Thus, DYNABEE has the following desirable properties: (a) Accurate: experiments on the largest available dataset from real hives show good accuracy; (b) Explainable: our model parameters have physical meaning; (c) Scalable: DYNABEE is linear on the input size; (d) Transferable: the fitted parameter values give good forecasting for new bee colonies, too.