Weight Prediction of Landlly Pigs from Morphometric Traits in Different Age Classes Using ANN and Non-Linear Regression Models

The present study was undertaken to identify the best estimator(s) of body weight based on various linear morphometric measures in Landlly pigs using artificial neural network (ANN) and non-linear regression models at three life stages (4th, 6th and 8th week). Twenty-four different linear morphometric measurements were taken on 279 piglets individually at all the stages and their correlations with body weight were elucidated. The traits with high correlation (≥0.8) with body weight were selected at different stages. The selected traits were categorized into 31 different combinations (single, two, three, four and five) and subjected to ANN modelling for determining the best combination of body weight predictors at each stage. The model with highest R2 and lowest MSE was selected as best fit for a particular trait. Results revealed that the combination of heart girth (HG), body length (BL) and paunch girth (PG) was most efficient for predicting body weight of piglets at the 4th week (R2 = 0.8697, MSE = 0.4419). The combination of neck circumference (NCR), height at back (HB), BL and HG effectively predicted body weight at 6 (R2 = 0.8528, MSE = 0.8719) and 8 (R2 = 0.9139, MSE = 1.2713) weeks. The two-trait combination of BL and HG exhibited notably high correlation with body weight at all stages and hence was used to develop a separate ANN model which resulted into better body weight prediction ability (R2 = 0.9131, MSE = 1.004) as compared to age-dependent models. The results of ANN models were comparable to non-linear regression models at all the stages