Dung Beetle Optimizer Algorithm and Machine Learning-Based Genome Analysis of Lactococcus lactis: Predicting...

In the global food industry, fermented dairy products are valued for their unique flavors and nutrients. Lactococcus lactis is crucial in developing these flavors during fermentation. Meeting diverse consumer flavor preferences requires the careful selection of fermentation agents. Traditional assessment methods are slow, costly, and subjective. Although electronic-nose and -tongue technologies provide objective assessments, they are mostly limited to laboratory environments. Therefore, this study developed a model to predict the electronic sensory characteristics of fermented milk. This model is based on the genomic data of Lactococcus lactis, using the DBO (Dung Beetle Optimizer) optimization algorithm combined with 10 different machine learning methods. The research results show that the combination of the DBO optimization algorithm and multi-round feature selection with a ridge regression model significantly improved the performance of the model. In the 10-fold cross-validation, the R² values of all the electronic sensory phenotypes exceeded 0.895, indicating an excellent performance. In addition, a deep analysis of the electronic sensory data revealed an important phenomenon: the correlation between the electronic sensory phenotypes is positively related to the number of features jointly selected. Generally, a higher correlation among the electronic sensory phenotypes corresponds to a greater number of features being jointly selected. Specifically, phenotypes with high correlations exhibit from 2 to 60 times more jointly selected features than those with low correlations. This suggests that our feature selection strategy effectively identifies the key features impacting multiple phenotypes, likely originating from their regulation by similar biological pathways or metabolic processes. Overall, this study proposes a more efficient and cost-effective method for predicting the electronic sensory characteristics of milk fermented by Lactococcus lactis. It helps to screen and optimize fermenting agents with desirable flavor characteristics, thereby driving innovation and development in the dairy industry and enhancing the product quality and market competitiveness.