Journal article

Untangling the complex inter-relationships between horse managers' perceptions of effectiveness of biosecurity practices using Bayesian graphical modelling

K Schemann, FI Lewis, SM Firestone, MP Ward, JALML Toribio, MR Taylor, NK Dhand

Preventive Veterinary Medicine | Published : 2013

Abstract

On-farm biosecurity practices have been promoted in many animal industries to protect animal populations from infections. Current approaches based on regression modelling techniques for assessing biosecurity perceptions and practices are limited for analysis of the interrelationships between multivariate data. A suitable approach, which does not require background knowledge of relationships, is provided by Bayesian network modelling. Here we apply such an approach to explore the complex interrelationships between the variables representing horse managers' perceptions of effectiveness of on-farm biosecurity practices. The dataset was derived from interviews conducted with 200 horse managers i..

View full abstract

University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation


Funding Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant: IZK0Z3_140188). The authors gratefully acknowledge the time and cooperation of the interviewed horse managers and thank the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries for making the equine influenza dataset available for selecting horse owners. The authors are also grateful for access to the Schrodinger supercomputer at the University of Zurich.