Dyadic interactions: Estimating Uncertainty in Dominance Hierarchy
The total number of interactions among the ten species was 258 interactions. The ratio of interaction to individuals (25.8) shows an adequate sampling effort beyond the 10-20 recommended range (Sánchez‐Tójar et al. 2017). Using the randomized Elo-rating method, we found that the shape of the hierarchy was intermediate in its steepness showing that rank in the hierarchy largely predicts the probability of winning an interaction (Fig 1). We quantify this by using the Elo-rating repeatability and found a steepness of 0.938.
We further estimated the uncertainty in the hierarchy by splitting the database into two, and estimating whether hierarchy from one half resembles the hierarchy estimated from the other half. We find that the degree of uncertainty/steepness in the hierarchy is intermediate (mean=0.76, 2.5 % and 97.5% quantile = (0.50,0.94)).