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2013 - 20182
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Author: Hemant Kumar × Start date: 1992 ×
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    ThesisItemOpen Access
    Energetics and techno economic assessment of different paddy straw densification processes
    (CCSHAU, 2018) Hemant Kumar; Vijaya Rani
    In India, a large portion of the residue is burnt on-farm primarily to clear the field for sowing of the succeeding crop. The burning of straw creates health, soil and environment hazards. From the total crop residue, cereal crops (rice, wheat, maize, and millets) contribute 70% while rice crop alone contribute 34%. Management of this huge amount of paddy straw becomes difficult for farmers. Many solutions are being tried to manage the paddy straw one of them is straw removal from field by making bales which can be easily handled and transported for animal feed, power generation, brick kiln etc. In the present study different densification process viz., using field baler after operation of stubble shaver with and without operation of hay rake. In third case loose straw was directly collected from field and baled by field baler in stationary mode. Further, full length straw and chopped by chaff cutter was used to make bale in hydraulic pressed type fixed stationary. In the study it was found that, if the harvesting of paddy is done by combine, then operating field baler after operation of stubble shaver and hay rake was most appropriate providing a maximum field capacity of 0.54 ha h-1, baling capacity 4.43 t h-1, volume compaction ratio of 5.26 with minimum time required of 0.44 h, man-h 3.57, energy of 102.65 MJ t-1 and cost of baling Rs 624 t-1. The scented variety of rice is mostly harvested manually for which the full length densification by a hydraulic press type fixed baler is appropriate with baling capacity 1.13 t h-1, maximum volume compaction ratio 6.87 and lowest cost of operation Rs 595 t-1. The transportation, storage become easy and safe with bales than loose straw. Maximum benefit was obtained with stationary baler for full length straw.
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    ThesisItemOpen Access
    Prediction of milk production using penalized regression techniques in cattle
    (CCSHAU, 2013) Hemant Kumar; Hooda, B.K.
    Multiple linear regression models (MLR) have been widely used in dairy sciences to predict lifetime milk production in cattle on the basis of lactation traits. MLR often gives unsatisfactory results in the presences of high multicollinearity among the explanatory variables. Choice of functional form and selection of xplanatory variables is also important for getting a parsimonious and useful model for explaining any phenomenon. In the presence of multicollinearity and model mis-specification ordinary least square estimators of regression parameters generally have low bias and large variances resulting poor predictive performance. Keeping in view the presence of multicollinearity in mind shrinkage and penalized regression techniques have been used along with the artificial neural network for prediction of lifetime milk production on the basis of lactation traits. In the present study lactation traits such as previous lactation yield, age at first calving, lactation length, calving interval, service period, and dry period have been used for prediction of lifetime milk yield in crossbred cattle data. The lifetime milk production has been defined as total amount of milk produced by cattle from initiation of first lactation till the completion of third lactation. Small eigen values of correlation matrix of predictor variables, high value of variance inflation factor and higher condition index indicated presence of multicollinearity in crossbred cattle data. Consequently biased and penalized regression models have been adopted to take care of multicollinearity among the predictors. In addition to ridge regression the relatively recent techniques of penalized regression called LASSO and elastic net given by Tibshirani (1996) and Zou and Hastie (2005) respectively were also applied for developing prediction model for lifetime milk production and selection of principal lactation traits. On the basis of AIC and BIC values LASSO and elastic net outperformed the ridge regression and elastic net techniques was found most satisfactory. Forward selection, backward elimination, LASSO and elastic net were used for selection of best subset of lactation traits for prediction of lifetime milk production. It was observed that seven variables out of eleven were selected by LASSO and six by elastic net using optimal value of regularization parameters. The optimum value of regularization parameters was computed using 10- fold cross validation. The number of traits in best subset was found to six for backward elimination and four for forward selection method. On the basis of adjusted R2, AIC and BIC values and simplicity of the model it was concluded that subset selected by LASSO techniques having just two significant traits was best. Evaluation of predicting performance of multiple regression, ridge regression, LASSO, elastic net and ANNs models has been done by dividing the sample under study into two sets, by taking 90% observations in training set and 10% observations on test set. Coefficient of determination, root mean square error, mean absolute error, mean absolute percentage error and Theil’s U-statistics were computed for the test set, and based on these performance measures elastic net was found most satisfactory techniques for prediction of lifetime milk yield using lactation traits in crossbred cattle.