Prediction of subacute ruminal acidosis based on milk fatty acids: A comparison of linear discriminant and support vector machine approaches for model development

Subacute ruminal acidosis (SARA), characterized by low rumen pH, is one of the most important metabolic disorders in dairy cattle. As dairy cows experiencing SARA often do not exhibit overt clinical symptoms, diagnostic biomarkers in milk are of interest. Data of six acidosis induction experiments with rumen-fistulated dairy cows were combined to assess the potential of milk fatty acids (FA) to identify acidotic cases, based on three threshold...