Author(s)

Emmanuel O. Salawu^5*, Musa Abdulraheem², Ayoola Shoyombo¹, Ayo Adepeju³, Sunday Davies⁴, Oludayo Akinsola^1*, Barthlomew Nwagu⁶

¹Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria.
²Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Kogi State University, Ayangba, Nigeria.
³Department of Mathematics, Lagos State University, Lagos, Nigeria.
⁴Institute of Ecology and Environmental Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Nigeria.
⁵Life Science College, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu.
⁶National Animal Production Research Institute, Shika, Nigeria.

In this (modest) study, we developed artificial neural network (ANN) models for predicting body weight using various independent (input) variables in eight-week old New Zealand white purebred and crossbred rabbits. From the whole data sets of similar age groups, 75 percent were used to train the neural network model and 25 percent were used to test the effectiveness of the model. Five predictor variables were used viz, breed, sex, heart girth, body length and height at wither as input variables and body weight was considered as dependent variable from the model. The ANN used was multilayer feed forward network with back propagation of error for efficient learning. Our ANN models (with R² = 0.68 at ten thousand iterations, and R² = 0.71 one million iterations) performed better than traditional multivariate linear regression (MLR) models (R² = 0.66) indicating that the ANN models were able to more accurately capture how the variations in input variables explained the variations in body weight. It is concluded that ANN models are more powerful than MLR models in predicting animals’ body weight. Nonetheless, we recognize that fitting an ANN model requires more computation resources than fitting a tradition MLR model but the benefits of its accuracy outweigh any demerit from the associated computation overhead.

Artificial Neural Network, New Zealand Rabbits, Multivariate Linear Regression

Salawu, E. , Abdulraheem, M. , Shoyombo, A. , Adepeju, A. , Davies, S. , Akinsola, O. and Nwagu, B. (2014) Using Artificial Neural Network to Predict Body Weights of Rabbits. Open Journal of Animal Sciences, 4, 182-186. doi: 10.4236/ojas.2014.44023.