Artificial neural network model for water consumption prediction in dairy farms

This work presents a model based on artificial neural network (ANN) applied to predict water consumption in Brazilian dairy farms. Inputs were simple process data such as number of lactating cows, milk productivity, type of management, among others, with low computational cost and satisfactory data prediction. Data used for ANN training was acquired during two years from 31 farms in semi-confined dairy production. The analysis of the results was based on the following statistical models’ indicators: R2 (Coefficient of determination), BIAS (trend coefficient), MAE (mean absolute error), RMSE (Root-mean-square deviation), NRMSE (percentage of the mean of the observations) and RAE (Relative absolute error). After performing the ANN training, the results showed good accuracy to predict water consumption in Brazilian dairy farms, with an average absolute error of 28.4% being obtained. On the other hand, considering the dataset used for ANN validation, an average absolute error of 48% was obtained.