Synergy Analysis Between the Temporal Dominance of Sensations and Temporal Liking Curves of Strawberries

The Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) method allows for the real-time tracking of changes in multiple sensory attributes, such as taste, aroma, and texture, during food tasting. Over the past decade, it has become an essential tool in sensory evaluation, offering novel insights into temporal sensory perception. When combined with the Temporal Liking (TL) method, TDS enables the investigation of how sensory changes influence instantaneous liking. Existing methods in time-series sensory evaluation have not simultaneously achieved the following two key objectives: (1) predicting TL curves from TDS curves and (2) identifying shared sensory-liking synergies across samples. In this study, we address this gap by applying supervised non-negative matrix factorization, which enables both precise prediction and interpretable synergy extraction. This novel approach has the potential to extend the applicability of TDS analysis to broader sensory evaluation contexts. We validated the method using the data for strawberries recorded in an earlier study. Our model, utilizing three latent synergy components accounting for 94% of the data variation, accurately predicted the TL curves from TDS curves with a median RMSE of 0.36 in cross-validation, approximately 1/16 of the maximum TL score. Moreover, these synergy components were highly interpretable, suggesting some key factors that explain individual variations in sensory perception. These findings highlight the effectiveness of synergy analysis in time-series sensory evaluation, leading to deeper understanding of the connections between temporal sensory and liking responses.