Machine learning-assisted spectroscopic approaches for pesticide residue detection in food matrices

The widespread use of pesticides in modern agriculture has substantially improved food production while raising serious concerns regarding contamination and food safety. Considerable scientific effort has focused on improving methods for monitoring and detecting pesticide residues in food to enhance safety assurance. Although chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry remains the gold standard, its routine application is constrained by high costs, labor-intensive sample preparation, and prolonged analysis times. Recent advances in spectroscopic techniques, including surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), Raman spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging (HSI), and near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, offer promising non-destructive, rapid, and sensitive alternatives for pesticide residue detection across diverse food matrices. When integrated with machine learning (ML), these approaches further improve predictive accuracy and analytical robustness. This review synthesizes recent advances in ML-assisted spectroscopic approaches for pesticide residue detection across diverse food matrices, with emphasis on analytical performance, preprocessing strategies, feature engineering, and model selection. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), support vector machines (SVMs), random forests (RFs), and ensemble learning methods are increasingly used to improve classification and quantitative prediction. Across the reviewed studies, analytical performance was generally strong, with high classification accuracies, while the lowest reported detection limit was achieved using a SERS-CNN platform. Despite these advances, key limitations remain, including reliance on laboratory-spiked samples, small dataset sizes, matrix interference, inconsistent validation strategies, high computational demands associated with high-dimensional spectral data, and limited field validation. Future directions should focus on hybrid AI-driven sensors, IoT integration, advanced data augmentation, QuEChERS-assisted preprocessing, and explainable AI to improve real-world applicability and interpretability.