Establishing a Berry Sensory Evaluation Model Based on Machine Learning

In recent years, people’s quality of life has increased, and the requirements for fruits have also become higher; blueberries are particularly popular because of their rich nutrients. In the blueberry industry chain, sensory evaluation is an important link in determining the quality of blueberries. Therefore, to make a more objective scientific evaluation of blueberry quality and reduce the influence of human factors, on the basis of traditional sensory evaluation methods, machine learning is introduced to establish a support vector regression prediction model optimized by the particle swarm algorithm. Ten physical and chemical flavor indices of blueberries (such as catalase, flavonoids, and soluble solids) were used as input data, and sensory evaluation scores were used as output data. Three different predictive models were applied and compared: a particle swarm optimization support vector machine, a convolutional neural network, and a long short-term memory network model. To ensure reliability, the experiments with each of the three models were repeated 20 times, and the mean of each index was calculated. The experimental results showed that the root mean square error and mean absolute error of the particle swarm optimization support vector machine were 0.45 and 0.40, respectively; these values were lower than those of the convolutional neural network (0.96 and 0.78, respectively) and the long short-term memory network (1.22 and 0.97, respectively). Hence, these results highlighted the superiority of the proposed model when sample data are limited.