A successful beef enterprise is contingent upon the integrated management of genetics, nutrition, health, marketing, and finances. From a genetic perspective, the industry has worked hard to identify and develop prediction tools (EPDs) for a large number of economically important traits. These EPD tools have been very effective in changing the genetic merit of beef breeds, and as a result, many...

Understanding and using EPDs continues to be a popular topic among cattle producers because of their effectiveness when properly used in genetic selection. Use of EPDs, as with many other standard management tools, is not required to survive in the beef cattle business, but those who do will excel in terms of genetic improvement. With so many traits to monitor in a cow herd, producers should no...

In test-based problems, solutions produced by search algorithms are typically assessed using average outcomes of interactions with multiple tests. This aggregation leads to information loss, which can render different solutions apparently indifferent and hinder comparison of search algorithms. In this paper we introduce performance profile, a generic, domainindependent, multi-criteria performan...

In the medical world, high quality digital registration in an Electronic Patient Dossier (EPD) of symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, test results, images, interpretations, and outcomes becomes commonplace. Together with a shortage of medical professionals, means that they experience pressure at the expense of actual ‘hands on the bed’. On the other hand, EPDs contain a wealth of largely unused, u...

IMPLICATIONS Genomic predictions for commercial cattle can be used to select replacement heifers, design mating strategies, and market calves. Presently, two companies (Igenity and Zoetis) offer genomic tests for commercial cattle. Like expected progeny differences (EPDs) on young bulls, these genomic tests do not perfectly predict genetic merit. However, these tests will be useful for identify...

Most conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms aim to optimize decisionmaking rules in terms of the expected returns. However, especially for risk management purposes, other risk-sensitive criteria such as the value-at-risk or the expected shortfall are sometimes preferred in real applications. Here, we describe a parametric method for estimating density of the returns, which allows u...

Cumulative milk production of crossbred daughters of sires of several breeds was estimated using weigh-suckle-weigh procedures. Pooled-across-breed analyses were conducted to determine, in retrospect, relationships of sire expected progeny difference (EPD) values for milk and total maternal value to daughter milk yield and daughter's offspring weaning weight. The pooled coefficient for regressi...