Estimation of SNP effects for health traits in Holstein-Friesian cow calibration groups: Comparison of random forest methodology with genome wide association studies

Up to now, only a few studies used RF methodology to discover genetic variants spread over the genome with regard to disease resistance or disease susceptibility in dairy cattle. In consequence, the objective of our study was to screen the whole genome in order to identify SNP with large effects by applying a classical GWAS approach and RF, and to infer overlaps between identified SNP with genes according to the Ensembl database (www.ensembl.org/biomart/martview).