Discrimination model of geographical area from coconut milk by near-infrared spectroscopy: Exploration in tandem with classical chemometrics, machine learning, and deep learning

This work proposes exploring the discrimination model by near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy (FT-NIR and Micro-NIR) for geographical source areas of coconut milk in tandem with the classical to modern chemometrics classifier. The discrimination model was developed using qualitative chemometrics techniques from classic (Principal Component Analysis-PCA, Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis-PLS-DA, Linear Discriminant Analysis-LDA) to modern, including classifiers from machine learning (Support Vector Machine-SVM, k-Nearest Neighbor-KNN, Artificial Neural Network-ANN) and deep learning (Simple Convolutional Neural Networks-S-CNN, S-AlexNET, Residual Networks-ResNET). Three sources as geographical areas of coconut milk originally from Thailand were used, including the south region (Chumphon Province), middle region (Samut Songkhram Province), and east region (Chonburi Province). Our findings showed that a classifier from SVM and ResNET could yield the optimal performance for discriminating the geographical source area of coconut milk using FT-NIR. Furthermore, when using Micro-NIR, the classifier from LDA, SVM, KNN and ResNET delivered the highest accuracy. The performance discrimination models above were excellent when classified based on the kappa coefficient. This study concluded that both FT-NIR and Micro-NIR supported by classical to modern chemometric classifiers could be used to evaluate the geographical area source from coconut milk. Also, the method in this study includes a strategy for discovering feature-important NIR spectra for interpretability purposes, thereby facilitating the qualitative interpretation of results for all types of classifiers.