2025/01/09 by Sergi Sanjuan, Sanjuan, S., Diego Méndez +9
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Engineering · #37M05 #68T05 #92B20 #Effects of Environmental Stressors on Livestock #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Heat Transfer Mechanisms #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.05494
openalex publication_date 2025/01/09 · openalex created_date 2025/01/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Heat stress is one of the main welfare and productivity problems faced by dairy cattle in Mediterranean climates. In this study, we approach the prediction of the daily shade-seeking count as a non-linear multivariate regression problem and evaluate two soft computing algorithms -- Random Forests and Neural Networks -- trained on high-resolution behavioral and micro-climatic data collected in a commercial farm in Titaguas (Valencia, Spain) during the 2023 summer season. The raw dataset (6907 daytime observations, 5-10 min resolution) includes the number of cows in the shade, ambient temperature and relative humidity. From these we derive three features: current Temperature--Humidity Index (THI), accumulated daytime THI, and mean night-time THI. To evaluate the models' performance a 5-fold cross-validation is also used. Results show that both soft computing models outperform a single Decision Tree baseline. The best Neural Network (3 hidden layers, 16 neurons each, learning rate = 10e-3) reaches an average RMSE of 14.78, while a Random Forest (10 trees, depth = 5) achieves 14.97 and offers best interpretability. Daily error distributions reveal a median RMSE of 13.84 and confirm that predictions deviate less than one hour from observed shade-seeking peaks. These results demonstrate the suitability of soft computing, data-driven approaches embedded in an applied-mathematical feature framework for modeling noisy biological phenomena, demonstrating their value as low-cost, real-time decision-support tools for precision livestock farming under heat-stress conditions.