The potential of decision trees as a tool to simplify broiler chicken welfare assessments.

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 101563288 Publication Model: Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 2045-2322 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 20452322 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Sci Rep Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: London : Nature Publishing Group, copyright 2011-

Decision Trees* ; Animal Welfare* ; Chickens*; Animals ; Animal Husbandry/methods ; Benchmarking/methods

To simplify fast-growth broiler welfare assessments and use them as a benchmarking tool, decision trees were used to identify iceberg indicators discriminating flocks passing/failing welfare assessments as with the complete AWIN protocol. A dataset was constructed with data from 57 flocks and 3 previous projects. A final flock assessment score, previously not included in the dataset, was calculated and used as the benchmarking assessment classifier (pass/fail). A decision tree to classify flocks was built using the Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) criterion. Cost-complexity pruning, and tenfold cross-validation were used. The final decision tree included cumulative mortality (%), immobile, lame birds (%), and birds with back wounds (%). Values were (mean ± se) 2.77 ± 0.14%, 0.16 ± 0.02%, 0.25 ± 0.02%, and 0.003 ± 0.001% for flocks passing the assessment; and 4.39 ± 0.49%, 0.24 ± 0.05%, 0.49 ± 0.09%, and 0.015 ± 0.006% for flocks failing. Cumulative mortality had the highest relative importance. The validated model correctly predicted 80.70% of benchmarking assessment outcomes. Model specificity was 0.8696; sensitivity was 0.5455. Decision trees can be useful to simplify welfare assessments. Model improvements will be possible as more information becomes available, and predictions are based on more samples.
(© 2024. The Author(s).)

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Date Created: 20241002 Date Completed: 20241002 Latest Revision: 20241005

20241005

PMC11447258

10.1038/s41598-024-74260-4

39358453