Nondestructive detection of sunset yellow in cream based on near-infrared spectroscopy and interval random forest

Based on near-infrared spectrum and interval random forest, a fast quantitative analysis method for the content of sunset yellow content was established. The spectra of 132 cream pigment samples were obtained by FT-NIR spectrometer, and various preprocessing methods such as standard normal variable (SNV), wavelet transform (WT), and SG (Savitzky-Golay) were used to smooth and denoise the original spectrum. In this paper, WT and first-order differentiation were used as pretreatment and the Kennard-Stone algorithm was used to divide the data set. Finally interval partial least squares, partial least squares, interval random forest and random forest were used to construct an optimal quantitative analysis model. The experimental results show that the interval random forest can find the best sub-interval to achieve the prediction ability of the model. The R² (the coefficient of determination) and RMSEP (root mean square error of the prediction) of the prediction set are 0.8965 and 0.2454, respectively. The research results show that near-infrared spectroscopy combined with interval random forest algorithm is a fast and non-destructive method to detect the content of sunset yellow in cream.