Abstract:
Hatchery performance is critical for the profitability of poultry breeder operations.
Some physical parameters of eggs and breeders cause to increase or decrease the
Hatchability. The aim of this study is to identify the affecting physical parameters on
the Commercial hatchability of local chicken eggs and to determine the most efficient
classifying model to investigate whether the hatchability rate is greater than 90% or
not. In this study, 674 breeder samples were considered, and seven physical
parameters such as Egg weight, Moisture Loss, Breeder age, Number of Fertilized eggs,
Shell width, Shell length, and Shell thickness were identified. After removing the
outliers, the existing sample was split into ten splits, and 80% and 20% of them were
used as training and testing samples, respectively. Multiple linear Regression was
performed to determine the most influencing variable on hatchability. First, a
correlation between each physical parameter and hatchability was checked. Then a
multiple regression equation was developed, and the accuracy of the fitted model was
evaluated. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Classification and Regression Trees
(CART), k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM) with a linear
kernel and Random Forest (RF) algorithms were applied to classify the hatchability.
Hatchability was negatively correlated with Egg weight, Breeders' age, Shell width,
Shell length, and positive correlations were identified with Moisture loss, Number of
Fertilized eggs and Shell thickness. Multiple linear regression models were more
accurate than single linear models in terms of the highest coefficient of determination
(R
2
) with 94% and minimum Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian
Information Criterion (BIC) values. According to the classification results, RF, CART and
kNN had the highest accuracy values of 0.999, 0.975 and 0.972, respectively, for the
commercial hatchery process. Therefore, the RF is the most appropriate machine
learning algorithm for classifying breeder outcomes in a commercial hatchery,
whether economically profitable or not.
