Aarhus Universitets segl

Use of online records for detection of diseases and heat in dairy cattle stocks

by Jørgen Vinsløv Hansen
PhD Dissertations August 2008
In recent years management of cattle herds has become a much more automated process and machinery for measuring a number of biological entities online has been developed. Analysis of such online data can be helpful to the farmer in the management of the herd. This thesis is a contribution to the ongoing research in analysing online data. The focus here is on using state space models, which are a class of models suited for analysing time series. In the thesis the developed techniques are applied to specific datasets. For example a state space model is developed to predict the time of heat in cows using measurements of progesterone concentrations in cow milk. Finally, the thesis also contains a study on the asymptotic behaviour of a certain class of parameter estimates in state space models.
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Thesis advisor: Jens Ledet Jensen