I. Adriaens, W. Ouweltjes, M. Pastell, E. Ellen, C. KamphuisPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"
<p>In precision livestock farming, technology-based solutions are used to monitor and manage<br>livestock and support decisions based on on-farm available data. In this study, we developed<br>a methodology to monitor the lying behaviour of dairy cows using noisy spatial positioning<br>data, thereby combining time-series segmentation based on statistical changepoints and a<br>machine learning classification algorithm using bagged decision trees. Position data (x, y, z<br>-coordinates) collected with an ultra-wide band positioning system from 30 dairy cows<br>housed in a freestall barn were used. After the data pre-processing and selection, statistical<br>changepoints were detected per cow-day (no. included = 331) in normalized 'distance from<br>the centre of the barn' and (z) time series. Accelerometer-based lying bout data were used<br>as a practical ground truth. For the segmentation, changepoint detection was compared<br>with getting-up or lying-down events as indicated by the accelerometers. For the<br>classification of segments into lying or non-lying behaviour, two data splitting techniques<br>resulting in 2 different training and test sets were implemented to train and evaluate<br>performance: one based on the data collection day and one based on cow identity. In 85.5%<br>of the lying-down or getting-up events a changepoint was detected in a window of 5<br>minutes. Of the events where no detection had taken place, 86.2% could be associated with<br>either missing data (large gaps) or a very short lying or non-lying bout. Overall classification<br>and lying behaviour prediction performance was above 91% in both independent test sets,<br>with a very high consistency across cow-days. Per cow-day, the average error in the<br>estimation of the lying durations were 7.1% and 7.8% for the cow-identity and time-based<br>data splits respectively. This resulted in sufficient accuracy for automated quantification of<br>lying behaviour in dairy cows, for example for health or welfare monitoring purposes. </p>