{"doi":"10.1038/s44277-024-00014-9","title":"Keeping it simple – a Simple Behavioral Analysis (SimBA) primer","abstract":"Neuroscience is approaching a critical juncture, transitioning from subjective behavioral observation to objective behavioral definition. This is now possible due to analytical tools using machine-guided solutions for animal markerless key-point pose tracking (see Table 1 for specialized terminology definitions) and behavioral detection. However, it is often challenging for behaviorists to adopt these approaches due to a lack of specialized computational knowledge. We and others have spent significant effort to solve this problem by democratizing access to these approaches, making them accessible to non-specialists. However, as these tools increase access to machine learning approaches, an emerging problem is ensuring that the predictions algorithms are making and the biology that they are defining are explainable and understandable. To address these challenges, we have introduced Simple Behavioral Analysis (SimBA) [ 1 ] as an open-source, supervised machine learning based platform for the automated detection of behavior, with a focus on understanding how the underlying machine learning algorithms make their decisions. Table 1 Glossary of terms commonly used in machine learning. Full size table","journal":"NPP—Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience","year":2024,"id":464314,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":5,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9512,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":231773,"name":"Sam A. Golden","orcid":"0000-0002-2104-2272","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1010801,"name":"Nastacia L. Goodwin","orcid":"0000-0002-1059-7491","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":4,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:04:37.468651Z","pmid":"39099890","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}