Probabilistic Modeling of Fish Growth in Smart Aquaculture Systems

We propose a probabilistic fish growth model for smart aquaculture systems equipped with IoT sensors that monitor the ecological environment. As IoT sensors permeate into smart aquaculture systems, environmental data such as oxygen level and temperature are collected frequently and automatically. However, there still exists data on fish weight, tank allocation, and other factors that are collected less frequently and manually by human workers due to technological limitations. Unlike sensor data, human-collected data are hard to obtain and are prone to poor quality due to missing data and reading errors. In a situation where different types of data are mixed, it becomes challenging to develop an effective fish growth model. This study explores the unique characteristics of such a combined environmental and weight dataset. To address these characteristics, we develop a preprocessing method and a probabilistic fish growth model using mixed data sampling (MIDAS) and overlapping mixtures of Gaussian processes (OMGP). We modify the OMGP to be applicable to prediction by setting a proper prior distribution that utilizes the characteristic that the ratio of fish groups does not significantly change as they grow. We conduct a numerical study using the eel dataset collected from a real smart aquaculture system, which reveals the promising performance of our model.