An Interpretable Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for FTIR Detection and Quantification of Adulteration Across Diverse Food...

Economically motivated adulteration of olive oil, coffee and fruit juice is a persistent food-fraud problem for which Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy with chemometrics offers rapid screening. Linear partial least squares (PLS) is interpretable but cannot capture non-linear mixing; neural networks add flexibility at the cost of becoming black boxes. We evaluated a Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN), which places learnable univariate functions on its edges and is therefore intrinsically interpretable, against PLS, support-vector regression, random forests, a multilayer perceptron and a one-dimensional convolutional network on three attenuated total reflectance (ATR)-FTIR datasets (olive oil + sunflower oil, coffee + malt flour, orange juice + apple juice; approximately 350, 400 and 400 spectra). All models were compared under identical, leakage-free validation that splits spectra by physical sample. The compact KAN was consistently competitive (cross-validated coefficients of determination (R²) = 0.86, 0.93 and 0.69) and yielded closed-form equations whose variables map to recognised vibrational bands and whose importance ranking agrees with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP; Spearman ρ = 0.86-0.90); symbolic conversion costs no accuracy. We also report the following limits: PLS was strongest where the chemistry was linear (coffee) and the multilayer perceptron was strongest on fruit juice, whose equation is the weakest (R² = 0.47-0.75 across seeds); a parameter-matched perceptron matched the KAN's accuracy; and leave-one-brand-out validation degraded every model. The KAN is therefore a promising, compact and genuinely transparent alternative under controlled multi-matrix conditions, not a deployment-ready method.