Predicting individual shelter dog behaviour after adoption using longitudinal behavioural assessment: a hierarchical Bayesian approach

Predicting the behaviour of shelter dogs after adoption is an important, but difficult, endeavour. Differences between shelter and post-adoption environments, between- and within-individual heterogeneity in behaviour, uncertainty in behavioural predictions and measurement error all hinder the accurate assessment of future behaviour. This study integrates 1) a longitudinal behavioural assessment with 2) a novel joint hierarchical Bayesian mixture model that accounts for individual variation, missing data and measurement error to predict behaviour post-adoption. We analysed shelter observations (> 28,000 records) and post-adoption reports (from telephone surveys) on the behaviour of 241 dogs across eight contexts. Dog behaviour at the shelter correlated positively with behaviour post-adoption within contexts (r = 0.38; 95% highest density interval: [0.20, 0.55]), and behavioural repeatability was approximately 20% higher post-adoption than at the shelter for behaviour within contexts. Although measurement error was higher post-adoption than at the shelter, we found few differences in individual-level, latent probabilities of different behaviours post-adoption versus at the shelter. This good predictive ability was aided by accurate representation of uncertainty in individual-level predictions. We conclude that longitudinal assessment paired with a sufficient inferential framework to model latent behavioural profiles with uncertainty enables reasonably accurate estimation of post-adoption behaviour.