Assessment of the Influence of Environmental Variables on Pig's Body Temperature using ANN and MLR Models

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to find out the most influential factors affecting pig's body temperature (PBT). For this purpose, eight environmental parameters and three growth related factors were considered as variables. Among these factors, seven environmental parameters, including temperature, CO2, temperature-humidity index inside and outside the pig's barn and relative humidity inside the barn were taken as input variables for artificial neural networks (ANN) and multiple linear regression (MLR) models due to their good correlation (r >= 0.5) with PBT. The results showed that ANN and MLR models had the lowest R-2 values (0.81 and 0.69, respectively) and the highest RMSE (1.17 and 1.48, respectively) when they were run without temperature-humidity index; however, the maximum R-2 (0.90 and 0.75, respectively) and minimum RMSE (0.92 and 1.40, respectively) were found without relative humidity. Based on the results, the temperature-humidity index could represent an important indicator in registering early warning signs of PBT status alternations.