Powerful and interpretable behavioural features for quantitative phenotyping of C. elegans

Behaviour is a sensitive and integrative readout of nervous system function and therefore an attractive measure for assessing the effects of mutation or drug treatment on animals. Video data provides a rich but high-dimensional representation of behaviour and so the first step of analysis is often some form of tracking and feature extraction to reduce dimensionality while maintaining relevant information. Modern machine learning methods are powerful but notoriously difficult to interpret, while handcrafted features are interpretable but do not always perform as well. Here we report a new set of handcrafted features to compactly quantify C. elegans behaviour. The features are designed to be interpretable but to capture as much of the phenotypic differences between worms as possible. We show that the full feature set is more powerful than a previously defined feature set in classifying mutant strains. We then use a combination of automated and manual feature selection to define a core set of interpretable features that still provides sufficient power to detect behavioural differences between mutant strains and the wild type. Finally, we apply the new features to detect time-resolved behavioural differences in a series of optogenetic experiments targeting different neural subsets.