Body Weight Prediction of Thalli Sheep Reared in Southern Punjab Using Different Data Mining Algorithms

This study is conducted to predict the body weight (BW) for Thalli sheep of southern Punjab from different body measurements. In the BW prediction, several body measurements viz., withers height, body length, head length, head width, ear length, ear width, neck length, neck width, heart girth, rump length, rump width, tail length, barrel depth and sacral pelvic width are used as predictors. The data mining algorithms such as Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID), Exhaustive CHAID, Classification and Regression Tree (CART) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are used to predict the BW for a total of 85 female Thalli sheep. The data set is partitioned into training (80 %) and test (20 %) sets before the algorithms are used. The minimum number of parent (4) and child nodes (2) are set in order to ensure their predictive ability. The R2 % and RMSE values for CHAID, Exhaustive CHAID, ANN and CART algorithms are 67.38(1.003), 64.37(1.049), 61.45(1.093) and 59.02(1.125), respectively. The mostsignificant predictor is BL in the BW prediction of Thalli sheep. The heaviest BW average of 9.596 kg is obtained from the subgroup of those having BL > 25.000 inches. On behalf of the several goodness of fit criteria, we conclude that the CHAID algorithm performance is better in order to predict the BW of Thalli sheep and more suitable decision tree diagram visually. Also, the obtained CHAID results may help to determine body measurements positively associated with BW for developing better selection strategies with the scope of indirect selection criteria.