Accuracy – The New Measure of Reliability

Until Alta introduced its ADVANTAGE young sire sampling program, there was only one measure of accuracy for sire proofs - RELIABILITY. It’s because of the exciting program that we now have a much more important measure - ACCURACY.

Before ADVANTAGE sampling became a reality, reliability was the only measure of how stable a bull’s proof would be over time. It is calculated based on the number of daughters in a bull’s proof, what lactation those daughters are in, and the distribution of daughters across herds. Unfortunately, the current methods for genetic evaluations have no way of accounting for the misidentification rate on individual sire’s daughters. Therefore if a given sire, let’s call him “BOB”, has 100 daughters in 60 herds in his proof, we would expect him to have a reliability of 90%. However that 90% reliability figure assumes 100% accuracy! In other words the assumption is that all of the daughters in his proof are actually his daughters. We know this is rarely the case. In fact, industry-wide we know that less than 75% of the daughters listed on a sire’s proof are actually his own!

If the industry average for identification accuracy is applied to “BOB” then he would actually have 75 true daughters in his proof which would generate a lower reliability than 90%. But the scenario for “BOB” and other bulls like him is in fact potentially worse. He also has 25 misidentified daughters that are adding inaccuracies to his proof. Not only are “BOB’s” reliability numbers artificially inflated, but because of inaccurately identified daughters, his proof numbers may not be an accurate reflection of what he actually transmits! Therefore to get a true measure of how stable a bull’s proof will be and how accurate the numbers are, we need an EFFECTIVE RELIABILITY measure that takes into account probable misidentification levels that exist. With Alta’s ADVANTAGE tested bulls that effective reliability will approach 100% of the published reliability thanks to DNA verification of parentage.

If “BOB” was an Alta ADVANTAGE sire, we would know his 100 daughters are truly his because they would be DNA-verified, making his effective reliability exactly the same as his published reliability and therefore making the information on his proof sheet not only reliable, but more importantly ACCURATE!!

This identification problem is not new, and other AI-companies certainly know about it, however Alta is the first to tackle it head on. In the business world, making decisions on inaccurate information can lead to costly errors. And as dairy enterprises become larger, the magnitude of that cost increases. Fortunately, Advantage sampling graduates are coming soon. They will provide you with not only Reliable information for your breeding program, but reliable information that’s ACCURATE!

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Posted Jan 25th

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