Measurement of fermentation parameters of Chinese rice wine using Raman spectroscopy combined with linear and non-linear regression methods

•Raman spectroscopy (RS) was applied to monitor fermentation process of Chinese rice wine.•Cars was applied to select the most important spectral variables.•SVM was used to improve the performances of linear models.

Effective fermentation monitoring is a growing need during the manufacture of wine due to the rapid pace of change in the wine industry. Ethanol and reducing sugar are two most important process variables indicating the status of Chinese rice wine (CRW) fermentation process. In this study, the potentials of Raman spectroscopy (RS) as a rapid process analytical technique to monitor the evolution of these two chemical parameters involved in CRW fermentation process and to group samples according to different fermentation stages were investigated. The results demonstrated that compared with the PLS model using all wavelengths of Raman spectra, the prediction precision of model based on the spectral variables selected by competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (Cars) was significantly improved. In addition, nonlinear models outperformed linear models in predicting fermentation parameters. After systemically comparison and discussion, it was found that for both ethanol and glucose, Cars-support vector machine (Cars-SVM) models gave the best results with the highest prediction precisions. Moreover, the results obtained from discriminant partial least squares analysis (DPLS) showed that good performances were obtained with an average correct classification rate of 94.9% for different fermentation stages. The overall results indicated that RS combined with efficient variable selection algorithm and nonlinear regression tool could be utilized as a rapid method to monitor CRW fermentation process.