Vibrational spectroscopy data fusion for enhanced classification of different milk types

The aim of this study is to classify seven types of Irish milk (butter, fresh, heart active, lactose free, light, protein, and slimline), supplied by a specific company, using vibrational spectroscopy methods: Near infrared (NIR), mid infrared (MIR), and Raman spectroscopy. In this regard, chemometric methods were used, and the impact of spectral data fusion on prediction accuracy was evaluated. A total of 105 samples were tested, with 21 used in the test set. The study assessed principal component analysis (PCA), partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and sequential and orthogonalized partial least squares linear discriminant analysis (SO-PLS-LDA) for classifying different milk types. The prediction accuracy, when applying PLS-DA on individual blocks of data and low-level fused data, did not exceed 85.71 %. However, implementing the SO-PLS-LDA strategy significantly improved the accuracy to 95 %, suggesting a promising method for the development of classification models for milk using data fusion strategies.