Application of Bayesian network for farmed eel safety inspection in the production stage

Abstract

The Bayesian network (BN) model was applied to analyze the characteristic variables that affect compliance with safety inspections of farmed eel during the production stage, using the data from 30,063 cases of eel aquafarm safety inspection in the Integrated Food Safety Information Network (IFSIN) from 2012 to 2021. The dataset for establishing the BN model included 77 non-conforming cases. Relevant HACCP data, geographic information about the aquafarms, and environmental data were collected and mapped to the IFSIN data to derive explanatory variables for nonconformity. Aquafarm HACCP certification, detection history of harmful substances during the last 5 y, history of nonconformity during the last 5 y, and the suitability of the aquatic environment as determined by the levels of total coliform bacteria and total organic carbon were selected as the explanatory variables. The highest achievable eel aquafarm noncompliance rate by manipulating the derived explanatory variables was 24.5%, which was 94 times higher than the overall farmed eel noncompliance rate reported in IFSIN between 2017 and 2021. The established BN model was validated using the IFSIN eel aquafarm inspection results conducted between January and August 2022. The noncompliance rate in the validation set was 0.22% (15 nonconformances out of 6,785 cases). The precision of BN model prediction was 0.1579, which was 71.4 times higher than the non-compliance rate of the validation set.