As INPUT will use an exploratory method, a plan of publication will be based on the trial results and the emerging themes arising from interviews and their subsequent analysis.
This research investigated data collected over a period from 2002 to 2014 from the interior of the STAs using data mining and analysis techniques including (a) exploratory methods such as Principal Component Analysis to test for patterns and groupings in the data, and (b) modelling approaches to test for predictive relationships between environmental variables.
Focus group research is recognised as an exploratory research method that best draws upon respondents' attitudes, feelings, beliefs, experiences and reactions in a way in which would not be feasible using other methods, for example, one-to-one interviewing [ 21].
Basche [ 10] defines focus groups as "a qualitative research technique used to obtain data about feelings and opinions of small groups of participants about a given problem, experience, service, or other phenomenon", and they are characterized as an exploratory research method [ 11].
Flow mapping, as a spatial visualization exploratory method, is typically used to visualize spatial interaction data, such as population migration and disease transmission [ 26, 27].
The Single Classification Tree Method was chosen as the statistical exploratory method because it outperformed other approaches such as logistic regression and boosting regression trees in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and area under the ROC curve, denoted aROC (10), on the testing dataset.
In every case that a disc was moved, it was picked up after the mouse had scanned, apparently looking for a disc, and in every case, having picked up the disc, it was carried to the new place of interest in a directed movement of more than >10 cm (which we define as an exploratory movement, see Methods below).
In order to simplify the data interpretation, and because of the multitude of variables of interest, we applied the PCA multivariate exploratory method as a tool to position each dog in comparison to the others during time.
As an exploratory study, several statistical methods (analysis of variance, means separations (Tukey HSD), principal component analysis (PCA), geo-statistical analysis, image classification and landscape metrics) were applied on point data and sensor images for evaluating the spatial variability within the landscape.
