The prediction of food additives in the fruit juice based on electronic nose with chemometrics

- E-nose was proposed to predict the contents of benzoic acid and chitosan in juice.
- Random forest (RF) and extreme learning machine (ELM) were used to process signals.
- Support vector machine (SVM) and partial least squares regression (PLSR) were applied to treat signals.
- Regression models based on RF and ELM showed higher prediction accuracy than SVM and PLSR.

Food additives are added to products to enhance their taste, and preserve flavor or appearance. While their use should be restricted to achieve a technological benefit, the contents of food additives should be also strictly controlled. In this study, E-nose was applied as an alternative to traditional monitoring technologies for determining two food additives, namely benzoic acid and chitosan. For quantitative monitoring, support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), extreme learning machine (ELM) and partial least squares regression (PLSR) were applied to establish regression models between E-nose signals and the amount of food additives in fruit juices. The monitoring models based on ELM and RF reached higher correlation coefficients (R2s) and lower root mean square errors (RMSEs) than models based on PLSR and SVM. This work indicates that E-nose combined with RF or ELM can be a cost-effective, easy-to-build and rapid detection system for food additive monitoring.

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