Using an artificial neural network to predict the probability of oviposition events of precision-fed broiler breeder hens

Identifying daily oviposition events for individual broiler breeders is important for bird management. Identifying non-laying birds in a flock that might be caused by improper nutrition or diseases can guide diet changes or disease treatments for these individuals. Oviposition depends on follicle maturation and egg formation, and follicle maturation can be variable. As such, the day and time of oviposition events of individual birds in a free-run flock can be hard to predict. Based on a precision feeding (PF) system that can record the feeding activity of individual birds, a recent study reported a machine learning model to predict daily egg-laying events of broiler breeders. However, there were 2 limitations in that study: 1) It could only be used to identify daily egg-laying events on a subsequent day; 2) The prediction outputs that were binary labels were unable to indicate more details among the outputs with the same label. To improve the previous approach, the current study aimed to predict and output the probability of daily oviposition events occurring using a specific time point in 1 day. In the current study, 706 egg-laying events recorded by nest boxes with radio frequency identification of hens and 706 randomly selected no-egg-laying events were used. The anchor point was newly defined in the current study as a specific time point in 1 day, and 26 features around the anchor point were created for all events (706 egg-laying events and 706 no-egg-laying events). A feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) model was built for prediction. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.9409, indicating that the model had an outstanding classification performance. The ANN model could predict oviposition events on the current day, and the output was a probability that could be informative to indicate the likelihood of an oviposition event for an individual breeder. In situations where total egg production was known for a group, the ANN model could predict the probability of daily oviposition events occurring of all individual birds and then rank them to choose those most likely to have laid an egg.