Research on the Assessment of Dairy Cow Dry Matter Intake Using ITSO-Optimized Stacking Ensemble Learning

Dry matter intake (DMI) in dairy cows is a critical indicator of nutrient intake from feed, serving as the cornerstone of precision feeding practices, playing a critical role in improving production efficiency and enhancing the quality of dairy products. To address the high costs of traditional measurement methods and the structural complexity and large parameter counts of neural network models, this study proposes a Stacking ensemble learning model to assess DMI, with model parameters optimized using the Tuna Swarm Optimization (TSO) algorithm to enhance assessment accuracy, taking cow body weight, lying duration, lying times, rumination duration, foraging duration, walking steps, and the concentrate-to-roughage feed ratio as input variables. To further improve TSO's search efficiency and spatial exploration, this study introduces Sine-Logistic chaotic mapping, Levy flight, and Gaussian random walk strategy to optimize the TSO algorithm, developing the improved Tuna Swarm Optimization (ITSO). ITSO-optimized Stacking model achieved superior performance in DMI assessment, with an accuracy of 95.84%, significantly outperforming SVR, RF, DT, GBR, ETR, and AdaBoost models. This study provides a robust tool for precision feeding, contributing to optimizing cow feeding strategies, improving farm efficiency, and supporting sustainable dairy farming practices.