Diagnosing scrapie in sheep: A classification experiment

  • Authors:
  • Ludmila I. Kuncheva;Victor J. del Rio Vilas;Juan J. Rodríguez

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Informatics, University of Wales, Bangor LL57 1UT, UK;Veterinary Laboratories Agency, New Haw, Addlestone, Surrey KT15 3NB, UK;Departamento de Ingeniería Civil, Universidad de Burgos, 09006 Burgos, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Computers in Biology and Medicine
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Scrapie is a neuro-degenerative disease in small ruminants. A data set of 3113 records of sheep reported to the Scrapie Notifications Database in Great Britain has been studied. Clinical signs were recorded as present/absent in each animal by veterinary officials (VO) and a post-mortem diagnosis was made. In an attempt to detect healthy animals within the set of suspects using only the clinical signs, 18 classification methods were applied ranging from simple linear classifiers to classifier ensembles such as Bagging, AdaBoost and Random Forests. The results suggest that the clinical classification by the VO was adequate as no further differentiation within the set of suspects was feasible.