Machine Learning Approaches for the Prediction of Displaced Abomasum in Dairy Cows Using a Highly Imbalanced Dataset

Displaced abomasum (DA) is a digestive disorder that causes severe economic losses through the reduction in milk yield and early culling of cows. The predictive potential of DA-susceptible cases is of great importance to reduce economic losses. This study aimed for early prediction of DA. However, identifying cows at risk of DA can be difficult because DA is a complex trait and its incidence is low. For this purpose, in this study, the ability of five machine learning algorithms, namely Logistic Regression (LR), Naïve Bayes (NB), Decision Tree, Random Forest (RF) and Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM), to predict cases of DA was investigated. For these predictions, 20 herd-cow-specific features and sire genetic information from 7 Holstein dairy herds that calved between 2010 and 2020 were available. Model performance metrics indicated that GBM and RF algorithms outperformed the others in predicting DA with F2 measures of 0.32. The true positive rate in the RF was the highest compared to other methods at 0.75, followed by GBM at 0.70. Given the highly imbalanced data, this study showed the potential in forecasting cases susceptible to DA. This prediction tool can aid dairy farmers in making preventative management decisions by identifying cows susceptible to DA.