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Lactation curves of dairy cows have been studied by dairy scientists for many years. The effects of various hereditary end non-hereditary influences on the lactation curve have been observed. Factors have been developed to standardize production to a common basis, correcting for differences in age, length of lactation, milking per day, gestation and environment.

A random forest is compared to an OLS model for predicting lactation curves for cows.Both of the methods have been estimated and tested using data from the period 2015-01 to2015-09. Random forests outperform OLS in testing for modeling lactation curves with adecrease in MSE by approximately 26%. Data is provided by Sveriges Lantrbruksuniversitetand includes 75 558 milking events from 320 cows. The date of the milking, the time ofday when the milking occurred as well as which cow was milked were found to be importantvariables for accurate predictions.

Submitted by (ana.araujo@ufrpe.br) on 2016-08-16T14:52:45Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tadeu Rodrigues da Costa.pdf: 720363 bytes, checksum: 0d88c29d42226d845c07376db4760d92 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-16T14:52:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tadeu Rodrigues da Costa.pdf: 720363 bytes, checksum: 0d88c29d42226d845c07376db4760d92 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-06-04 / Lactation curves graphically represent individual milk or dairy herd production during their lactation period and they carry an unquestionable importance in terms of understanding the behavior of that particular herd production, which is fundamental to take decisions over conditions of the herd. Among many Brazilian dairy breeds that exist nowadays, the Sindhi breed has a special role in milk production because of its adaptation to the hard semiarid climate, turning it into a feasible alternative for milk production in Brazil´s Northeast. Therefore, the deal of this work was to use a linear mixed model in a database of a Sindhi breed herd, in order to verify milk production and animals individual forecast of this herd. Furthermore, the analysis of the waste and the sensitivity to verify model adaptability were done. The main result was that mixed linear model was suitable to study the behavior of each animal and the prediction of milk production. / Curvas de lactação representam, de forma gráfica, a produção de leite individual ou de um rebanho durante seu período de lactação e carregam uma importância indiscutível no que tange o entendimento do comportamento da produção daquele determinado rebanho, sendo fundamental na tomada de decisões acerca das condições do rebanho. Dentre as muitas raças leiteiras existentes hoje no Brasil, a raça Sindi tem um papel especial na produção de leite por se adaptar à rigorosidade do clima semi-árido, tornando-se uma alternativa viável para a produção de leite no Nordeste.Nesse sentido, o objetivo desse trabalho foi o de aplicar um modelo linear misto em um banco de dados de um rebanho da raça Sindi, com o intuito de verificar a produção de leite e a previsão individual dos animais desse rebanho. Além disso, foi feita a análise de resíduos e sensibilidade para verificação da adequacidade do modelo. Como resultado principal, o modelo linear misto foi considerado adequado para estudar o comportamento individual de cada animal e a previsão da produção de leite.