The Importance of Low Daily Risk for the Prediction of Treatment Events of Individual Dairy Cows with Sensor Systems

Abstract

The prediction of health disorders is the goal of many sensor systems in dairy farming. Although mastitis and lameness are the most common health disorders in dairy cows, these diseases or treatments are a rare event related to a single day and cow. A number of studies already developed and evaluated models for classifying cows in need of treatment for mastitis and lameness with machine learning methods, but few have illustrated the effects of the positive predictive value (PPV) on practical application. The objective of this study was to investigate the importance of low-frequency treatments of mastitis or lameness for the applicability of these classification models in practice. Data from three German dairy farms contained animal individual sensor data (milkings, activity, feed intake) and were classified using machine learning models developed in a previous study. Subsequently, different risk criteria (previous treatments, information from milk recording, early lactation) were designed to isolate high-risk groups. Restricting selection to cows with previous mastitis or hoof treatment achieved the highest increase in PPV from 0.07 to 0.20 and 0.15, respectively. However, the known low daily risk of a treatment per cow remains the critical factor that prevents the reduction of daily false-positive alarms to a satisfactory level. Sensor systems should be seen as additional decision-support aid to the farmers’ expert knowledge.