Evaluation of fish meal freshness using a metal‐oxide semiconductor electronic nose combined with the long short‐term memory feature extraction method

Abstract To improve the classification and regression performance of the total volatile basic nitrogen (TVB‐N) and acid value (AV) of different freshness fish meal samples detected by a metal‐oxide semiconductor electronic nose (MOS e‐nose), 402 original features, 62 manually extracted features, manually extracted and selected features by the RFRFE method, and the features extracted by the long short‐term memory (LSTM) network were used as inputs to identify the freshness. The classification performance of the freshness grades and the estimation performance of the TVB‐N and AV values of fish meal with different freshness were compared. According to the sensor response curve, preprocessing and feature extraction steps were first applied to the original data. Then, five classification algorithms and four regression algorithms were used for modeling. The results showed that a total of 30 features were extracted using the LSTM network, and the number of extracted features was significantly reduced. In the classification, the highest accuracy rate of 95.4% was obtained using the support vector machine method. In the regression, the least squares support vector regression method obtained the best root mean square error (RMSE). The coefficient of determination ( R 2 ), RMSE, and relative standard deviation (RSD) between the predicted value of TVBN and the actual value were 0.963, 11.01, and 7.9%, respectively. The R 2 , RMSE, and RSD between the predicted value of AV and the actual value were 0.972, 0.170, and 6.05%, respectively. The LSTM feature extraction method provided a new method and reference for feature extraction using an E‐nose to identify other animal‐derived material samples.