In this study, examination of the characteristics of body measurements
affecting the body weight of Boer goats and the estimation of the body
weight were investigated. To examine their body morphological features, 400
live animals were taken into consideration. The morphological measurements
taken from the goats in the study were body weight (BW), body length (BL),
heart girth (HG), withers height (WH), rump height (RH), rump length (RL),
ear length (EL) and head with (HW) respectively. These animals were between
1-6 years old; 112 of them were male and 288 of them were female. Multiple
regression, ridge regression and artificial neural networks (ANN) methods
were applied to estimate the body weight. In the prediction of body weight
as a dependent variable, the ANNs predictive model produced high predictive
performance. Mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAD) and mean
absolute percent error (MAPE) statistics were used to determine model
performance. Using the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Artificial Neural
Network (ANN) learning algorithm, the body features that had the greatest
impact on body weight were determined. Comparison of the predictive
performance of the put forward model against both multiple regression and
state of the ridge regression methods showed that the artificial neural
networks outperformed both competing models by achieving the least values
for MAD, MSE and MAPE in both training and testing data sets. The results of
artificial neural networks were promising and accurate in the prediction of
the body weight of goats.