---
_id: '61025'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: The concept of social dominance has been used in a plethora of studies to
    assess animal behaviour and relationships between individuals for nearly a century.
    Nevertheless, a standard approach does not yet exist to assess dominance in species
    that have a nonlinear or weakly linear hierarchical structure. We amassed 316
    published data sets and show that 73.7% of the data sets and 90.3% of 103 species
    that we reviewed do not have a strongly linear structure. Herein, we present a
    novel method, ADAGIO, for assessing the structure of dominance networks. ADAGIO
    computes dominance hierarchies, in the form of directed acyclic graphs, to represent
    the dominance relations of a given group of animals. Thus far, most methods for
    computing dominance ranks assume implicitly that the dominance relation is a total
    order of the individuals in a group. ADAGIO does not assume or require this to
    be always true, and is hence more appropriate for analysing dominance hierarchies
    that are not strongly linear. We evaluated our approach against other frequently
    used methods, I&SI, David's score and Elo-rating, on 12 000 simulated data sets
    and on 279 interaction matrices from published, empirical data. The results from
    the simulated data show that ADAGIO achieves a significantly smaller error, and
    hence performs better when assigning ranks than other methods. Additionally, ADAGIO
    generated accurate dominance hierarchies for empirical data sets with a high index
    of linearity. Hence, our findings suggest that ADAGIO is currently the most reliable
    method to assess social dominance in gregarious animals living in groups of any
    size. Furthermore, since ADAGIO was designed to be generic, its applicability
    has the potential to extend beyond dominance data. The source code of our algorithm
    and all simulations used for this paper are publicly available at http://ngonga.github.io/adagio/.
article_type: original
author:
- first_name: Pamela Heidi
  full_name: Douglas, Pamela Heidi
  id: '72311'
  last_name: Douglas
- first_name: Axel-Cyrille
  full_name: Ngonga Ngomo, Axel-Cyrille
  id: '65716'
  last_name: Ngonga Ngomo
- first_name: Gottfried
  full_name: Hohmann, Gottfried
  last_name: Hohmann
citation:
  ama: Douglas PH, Ngonga Ngomo A-C, Hohmann G. A novel approach for dominance assessment
    in gregarious species: ADAGIO. <i>Animal Behaviour</i>. 2016;123:21-32. doi:<a
    href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014">10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014</a>
  apa: Douglas, P. H., Ngonga Ngomo, A.-C., &#38; Hohmann, G. (2016). A novel approach
    for dominance assessment in gregarious species: ADAGIO. <i>Animal Behaviour</i>,
    <i>123</i>, 21–32. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014</a>
  bibtex: '@article{Douglas_Ngonga Ngomo_Hohmann_2016, title={A novel approach for
    dominance assessment in gregarious species: ADAGIO}, volume={123}, DOI={<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014">10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014</a>},
    journal={Animal Behaviour}, publisher={Elsevier BV}, author={Douglas, Pamela Heidi
    and Ngonga Ngomo, Axel-Cyrille and Hohmann, Gottfried}, year={2016}, pages={21–32}
    }'
  chicago: 'Douglas, Pamela Heidi, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, and Gottfried Hohmann.
    “A Novel Approach for Dominance Assessment in Gregarious Species: ADAGIO.” <i>Animal
    Behaviour</i> 123 (2016): 21–32. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014</a>.'
  ieee: 'P. H. Douglas, A.-C. Ngonga Ngomo, and G. Hohmann, “A novel approach for
    dominance assessment in gregarious species: ADAGIO,” <i>Animal Behaviour</i>,
    vol. 123, pp. 21–32, 2016, doi: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014">10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014</a>.'
  mla: Douglas, Pamela Heidi, et al. “A Novel Approach for Dominance Assessment in
    Gregarious Species: ADAGIO.” <i>Animal Behaviour</i>, vol. 123, Elsevier BV, 2016,
    pp. 21–32, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014">10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014</a>.
  short: P.H. Douglas, A.-C. Ngonga Ngomo, G. Hohmann, Animal Behaviour 123 (2016)
    21–32.
date_created: 2025-08-26T19:24:18Z
date_updated: 2025-08-26T19:57:38Z
department:
- _id: '40'
doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.10.014
extern: '1'
intvolume: '       123'
keyword:
- aggression
- behaviour
- comparability
- directed acyclic graph
- hierarchy
- linearity
- nonlinearity
- social rank
- totality
language:
- iso: eng
page: 21-32
publication: Animal Behaviour
publication_identifier:
  issn:
  - 0003-3472
publication_status: published
publisher: Elsevier BV
status: public
title: A novel approach for dominance assessment in gregarious species: ADAGIO
type: journal_article
user_id: '72311'
volume: 123
year: '2016'
...