Methods of predicting milk yield in dairy cows—Predictive capabilities of Wood's lactation curve and artificial neural networks (ANNs)

Modeling lactation curves of Polish Holstein-Friesian cows. Part II: Prediction of 305-d lactation milk, fat and protein yields

“…Appropriate and accurate modeling of lactation curves for individual animals and herds may help breeders make the right breeding decisions regarding, for example, selection or culling. According to Grzesiak et al (2006), cows with a very high peak yield are unable to take the necessary amount of nutrition during the first stage of lactation, and this may cause a negative energy balance, reduced reproduction rate, and increased susceptibility to diseases. To lower the cost of milk recording, many breeders have abandoned the A4 method and chosen a cheaper method (AT4 or A8).…”

“…Recently, splines have been proposed as a good alternative to Legendre polynomials (Bohmanova et al, 2008). A variety of different mathematical models have also been examined for modeling lactation curves of the Polish population of cows Frącz, 2002, 2003;Frącz and Ptak, 2003;Ptak et al, 2004;Strabel et al, 2005;Grzesiak et al, 2006;Otwinowska-Mindur et al, 2013).…”

Examples of the Use of Data Mining Methods in Animal Breeding

“…The next successful attempt at using ANNs for predicting milk yield in dairy cows was based on daily milk yields recorded between 5 and 305 days in milk [49]. The following predictor variables were used in the ANN model: proportion of Holstein-Friesian genes in cow genotype, age at calving, days in milk and lactation number.…”

“…For the evaluation of predictions made by regression models, the following parameters calculated for the test set can be applied [49]: …”

Modeling Energy Use in Dairy Cattle Farms by Applying Multi-Layered Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (MLANFIS)

“…Grzesiak et al (2006) applied the ANNs model to predict the milk yield of dairy cattle farming in Canada. Also, an ANNs approach for forecasting world green energy consumption to the year 2050 was presented and the equations for consumption of different energy sources were obtained.…”