Predicting the growth performance of growing-finishing pigs based on net energy and digestible lysine intake using multiple regression and artificial neural networks models

BACKGROUNDS: Evaluating the growth performance of pigs in real-time is laborious and expensive, thus mathematical models based on easily accessible variables are developed. Multiple regression (MR) is the most widely used tool to build prediction models in swine nutrition, while the artificial neural networks (ANN) model is reported to be more accurate than MR model in prediction performance. Therefore, the potential of ANN models in predicting the growth performance of pigs was evaluated and compared with MR models in this study. RESULTS: Body weight (BW), net energy (NE) intake, standardized ileal digestible lysine (SID Lys) intake, and their quadratic terms were selected as input variables to predict ADG and F/G among 10 candidate variables. In the training phase, MR models showed high accuracy in both ADG and F/G prediction (R(2)(ADG) = 0.929, R(2)(F/G) = 0.886) while ANN models with 4, 6 neurons and radial basis activation function yielded the best performance in ADG and F/G prediction (R(2)(ADG) = 0.964, R(2)(F/G) = 0.932). In the testing phase, these ANN models showed better accuracy in ADG prediction (CCC: 0.976 vs. 0.861, R(2): 0.951 vs. 0.584), and F/G prediction (CCC: 0.952 vs. 0.900, R(2): 0.905 vs. 0.821) compared with the MR models. Meanwhile, the “over-fitting” occurred in MR models but not in ANN models. On validation data from the animal trial, ANN models exhibited superiority over MR models in both ADG and F/G prediction (P < 0.01). Moreover, the growth stages have a significant effect on the prediction accuracy of the models. CONCLUSION: Body weight, NE intake and SID Lys intake can be used as input variables to predict the growth performance of growing-finishing pigs, with trained ANN models are more flexible and accurate than MR models. Therefore, it is promising to use ANN models in related swine nutrition studies in the future. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40104-022-00707-1.