Protecting Wildlife under Imperfect Observation

Wildlife poaching presents a serious extinction threat to many animal species. In order to save wildlife in designated wildlife parks, park rangers conduct patrols over the park area to combat such illegal activities. An important aspect of the patrolling activity of the rangers is to anticipate where the poachers are likely to catch animals and then respond accordingly. Previous work has applied defender-attacker Stackelberg Security Games (SSGs) to solve the problem of wildlife protection, wherein attacker behavioral models are used to predict the behaviors of the poachers. However, these behavioral models have several limitations which limit their accuracy in predicting poachers’ behavior. First, existing models fail to account for the rangers’ imperfect observations w.r.t poaching activities (due to the limited capability of rangers to patrol thoroughly over a vast geographical area). Second, these models are built upon discrete choice models that assume a single agent choosing targets, while it is infeasible to obtain information about every single attacker in wildlife protection. Third, these models do not consider the effect of past poachers’ actions on the current poachers’ activities, one of the key factors affecting the poachers’ behaviors. In this work, we attempt to address these limitations while providing three main contributions. First, we propose a novel hierarchical behavioral model, HiBRID, to predict the poachers’ behaviors wherein the rangers’ imperfect detection of poaching signs is taken into account — a significant advance towards existing behavioral models in security games. Furthermore, HiBRID incorporates the temporal effect on the poachers’ behaviors. The model also does not require a known number of attackers. Second, we provide two new heuristics: \textit{parameter separation} and \textit{target abstraction} to reduce the computational complexity in learning the model parameters. Finally, we use the real-world data collected in Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP) in Uganda over 12 years to evaluate the prediction accuracy of our new model