Identification of coumarin‐based food additives using terahertz spectroscopy combined with manifold learning and improved support vector machine

The purpose of this paper is to use terahertz (THz) spectroscopy combined with manifold learning and improved support vector machine (SVM) model to identify the coumarin-based food additives. The 216 THz absorbance spectra (144 for calibration set and 72 for prediction set) of six coumarin-based food additives are measured by using THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) in the range of 0.5-2.0 THz. The method (P-t-SNE) combined principal component analysis (PCA) with manifold learning t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) is used for feature extraction of the THz spectra. Then, an improved SVM using differential evolution (DE) to improve gray wolf optimization (GWO) to optimize parameters is proposed. Finally, the result shows that the prediction set accuracy of PCA-DEGWO-SVM, P-t-SNE-DEGWO-SVM, and P-t-SNE-GWO-SVM models are 97.22%, 98.61%, and 95.83%, respectively, indicating that the accuracy by P-t-SNE is increased by about 1.39% compared with that processed by PCA, and the accuracy by DEGWO is also increased by about 2.78% compared with that processed by GWO. In conclusion, the improved model (P-t-SNE-DEGWO-SVM) has the best identification effect, and it is proved to be an effective method to identify coumarin-based food additives. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: The method used in this paper can be applied in the field of food safety detection. When detecting coumarin-based food additives, the method proposed in this paper is more time-saving and efficient than traditional detection methods. Through some more tests and adjustments, it will be possible to achieve rapid and on-site identification of various food additives.