A genetic analysis of mortality in pigs

Abstract

An analysis of mortality is undertaken in two breeds of pigs: Danish Landrace and Yorkshire. Zero-inflated and standard versions of hierarchical Poisson, binomial, and negative binomial Bayesian models were fitted using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The objectives of the study were to investigate whether there is support for genetic variation for mortality and to study the quality of fit and predictive properties of the various models. In both breeds, the model that provided the best fit to the data was the standard binomial hierarchical model. The model that performed best in terms of the ability to predict the distribution of stillbirths was the hierarchical zero-inflated negative binomial model. The best fit of the binomial hierarchical model and of the zero-inflated hierarchical negative binomial model was obtained when genetic variation was included as a parameter. For the hierarchical binomial model, the estimate of the posterior mean of the additive genetic variance (posterior standard deviation in brackets) at the level of the logit of the probability of a stillbirth was 0.173(0.039) in Landrace and 0.202(0.048) in Yorkshire. The implications of these results from a breeding perspective are briefly discussed.