A study on modeling growth model of Adana pigeons

Abstract

The study aims to determine a mathematical model that can be used to describe the growth of the Adana pigeon. Since pigeons have only one breeding season, just one or two pairs of baby pigeons are raised per year. Hatchlings sometimes die before reaching adulthood. For this reason, measurements can be taken for 10, 15 and 60 days periods. Related with this issue, only 43-days measurements of 68 pigeons are used over a 6-year period. The study is modelled by taking the day-to-day average of the data (43 days) of 68 pigeons. The study was conducted on 68 Adana pigeons in the interval between the age of 1 and 43 days. The growth of pigeon cub was measured by daily live weight until 1 to 43 days. The estimation is carried out by writing the specific Matlab codes. Classical growth functions used in animals are in nonlinear form. Various numerical methods have been developed to estimate parameters in nonlinear functions. Special program routines have been developed to implement these methods. In these nonlinear models, there are more than one parameter to be estimated. Therefore, the number of mathematical operations in estimating the parameters is large. The most used models in the literature are Brody, Bertalanffy, Logistic, Generalized Logistic, Gompertz, Richards, Negative Exponential, Stevens, and Tanaka. However, as far as is known, there is no published article for Adana pigeons that uses all of these models and compares which one is better. These models are Brody, Bertalanffy, Logistic, Generalized Logistic, Gompertz, Richards, Negative Exponential, Stevens, and Tanaka. The best analysis was done by the Richards model in terms of both the Mean Squared Error (MSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and (Coefficient of Determination) R2 .