Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy Combined with Nonlinear Manifold Learning for Improvement Aluminum Alloy Classification Accuracy

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) spectra often include many intensity lines, and obtaining meaningful information from the input dataset and condensing the dimensions of the original data has become a significant challenge in LIBS applications. This study was conducted to classify five different types of aluminum alloys rapidly and noninvasively, utilizing the manifold dimensionality reduction technique and a support vector machine (SVM) classifier model integrated with LIBS technology. The augmented partial residual plot was used to determine the nonlinearity of the LIBS spectra dataset. To circumvent the curse of dimensionality, nonlinear manifold learning techniques, such as local tangent space alignment (LTSA), local linear embedding (LLE), isometric mapping (Isomap), and Laplacian eigenmaps (LE) were used. The performance of linear techniques, such as principal component analysis (PCA) and multidimensional scaling (MDS), was also investigated compared to nonlinear techniques. The reduced dimensions of the dataset were assigned as input datasets in the SVM classifier. The prediction labels indicated that the Isomap-SVM model had the best classification performance with the classification accuracy, the number of dimensions and the number of nearest neighbors being 96.67%, 11, and 18, respectively. These findings demonstrate that the combination of nonlinear manifold learning and multivariate analysis has the potential to classify the samples based on LIBS with reasonable accuracy.