Leveraging IGOOSE-XGBoost for the Early Detection of Subclinical Mastitis in Dairy Cows

Subclinical mastitis in dairy cows poses a significant challenge to the dairy industry, leading to reduced milk yield, altered milk composition, compromised animal health, and substantial economic losses for dairy farmers. A model based on the XGBoost algorithm, optimized with an Improved GOOSE Optimization Algorithm (IGOOSE), is presented in this work as an innovative approach for predicting subclinical mastitis in order to overcome these problems. The Dairy Herd Improvement (DHI) records of 4154 cows served as the model’s original foundation. A total of 3232 samples with 21 characteristics made up the final dataset, following extensive data cleaning and preprocessing. To overcome the shortcomings of the original GOOSE algorithm in intricate, high-dimensional problem spaces, three significant enhancements were made. First, an elite inverse strategy was implemented to improve population initialization, enhancing the algorithm’s balance between global exploration and local exploitation. Second, an adaptive nonlinear control factor was added to increase the algorithm’s stability and convergence speed. Lastly, a golden sine strategy was adopted to reduce the risk of premature convergence to suboptimal solutions. According to experimental results, the IGOOSE-XGBoost model works better than other models in predicting subclinical mastitis, especially when it comes to recognizing somatic cell scores, which are important markers of the illness. This study provides a strong predictive framework for managing the health of dairy cows, allowing for the prompt identification and treatment of subclinical mastitis, which enhances the efficiency and quality of milk supply.