Time Series Analysis of Live Weight as Health Indicator

Of daily changes in live weight in dairy cattle is often claimed that they could serve as useful information for both the diagnosis of health problems and for feed management (Maltz et al., 1997). However the inter and intra individual differences in live weight data make straight-forward thresholds hard to use, as they are likely to cause high amounts of false attentions. Due to the noisy character of the data it is crucial to use adequate filter techniques to be able to apply management by exception. The Astronaut A3TM (Lely Industries, Maassluis, the Netherlands) is equipped with a weighing floor primarily used to guide the robot arm safely into the robot box, but live weight data can be used for other purposes too. The aim of this study is to show the accuracy and precision of the live weight data as a health indicator when using a Holt-Winters forecasting technique.