A XGBoost-Based Prediction Method for Meat Sheep Transport Stress Using Wearable Photoelectric Sensors and Infrared Thermometry

Transportation pressure poses a serious threat to the health of live sheep and the quality of their meat. So, the edible Hu sheep was chosen as the research object for meat sheep. We constructed a systematic biosignal detecting, processing, and modeling method. The biosignal sensing was performed with wearable sensors (photoelectric sensor and infrared temperature measurement) for physiological dynamic sensing and continuous monitoring of the transport environment of meat sheep. Core waveform extraction and modern spectral estimation methods are used to determine and strip out the target signal waveform from it for the purpose of accurate sensing and the acquisition of key transport parameters. Subsequently, we built a qualitative stress assessment method based on external manifestations with reference to the Karolinska drowsiness scale to establish stage classification rules for monitoring data in the transportation environment of meat sheep. Finally, machine learning algorithms such as Gaussian Naive Bayes (GaussianNB), Passive-Aggressive Aggregative Classifier (PAC), Nearest Centroid (NC), K-Nearest Neighbor Classification (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Classification (SVC), Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) were established to predict the classification models of transportation stress in meat sheep. Their classification results were compared. The results show that SVC and GBDT algorithms are more effective and the overall model classification accuracy reached 86.44% and 91.53%. XGB has the best results. The accuracy of the assessment of the transport stress state of meat sheep after the optimization of three parameters was 100%, 90.91%, and 93.33%, and the classification accuracy of the overall model reached 94.92%. The final results achieved improve transport reliability, reduce transport risk, and solve the problems of inefficient meat sheep transport supervision and quality control.