Food safety testing by negentropy-sorted kernel independent component analysis based on infrared spectroscopy

In the field of food safety testing, variety, brand, origin, and adulteration are four important factors. In this study, a novel food safety testing method based on infrared spectroscopy is proposed to investigate these factors. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy data are analyzed using negentropy-sorted kernel independent component analysis (NS-kICA) as the feature optimization method. To rank the components, negentropy is performed to measure the non-Gaussian independent components. In our experiment, the proposed method was run on four datasets to comprehensively investigate the variety, brand, origin, and adulteration of agricultural products. The experimental results show that NS-kICA outperforms conventional feature selection methods. The support vector machine model outperforms the backpropagation artificial neural network and partial least squares models. The combination of NS-kICA and support vector machine (SVM) is the best method for achieving high, stable, and efficient recognition performance. These findings are of great importance for food safety testing.