A Machine Learning Approach for Lamb Meat Quality Assessment Using FTIR Spectra

The food industry requires automatic methods to establish authenticity of food products. In this work, we address the problem of the certification of suckling lamb meat with respect to the rearing system. We evaluate the performance of neural network classifiers as well as different dimensionality reduction techniques, with the aim of categorizing lamb fat by means of spectroscopy and analyzing the features with more discrimination power. Assessing the stability of feature ranking algorithms also becomes particularly important. We assess six feature selection techniques (χ
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, Information Gain, Gain Ratio, Relief and two embedded techniques based on the decision rule 1R and SVM (Support Vector Machine). Additionally, we compare them with common approaches in the chemometrics field like the Partial Least Square (PLS) model and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) regression. Experimental results with a fat sample dataset collected from carcasses of suckling lambs show that performing feature selection contributes to classification performance increasing accuracy from 89.70% with the full feature set to 91.80% and 93.89% with the SVM approach and PCA, respectively. Moreover, the neural classifiers yield a significant increase in the accuracy with respect to the PLS model (85.60% accuracy). It is noteworthy that unlike PCA or PLS, the feature selection techniques that select relevant wavelengths allow the user to identify the regions in the spectrum with the most discriminant power, which makes the understanding of this process easier for veterinary experts. The robustness of the feature selection methods is assessed via a visual approach.