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CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY Eleni Anthippi Chatzimichali ...

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ABSTRACT<br />

Muscle foods such as meat, fish and poultry are an integral part of human diet. Over<br />

time, such food succumbs to spoilage, resulting from various intrinsic and extrinsic<br />

factors, the most significant of which is microbial activity. Spoilage changes the<br />

organoleptic properties of meat, rendering it unacceptable to the consumer, and may<br />

ultimate result in the food becoming toxic. Spoilage is therefore of major commercial<br />

and public health interest.<br />

This thesis describes the development and application of a novel suite of software<br />

tools designed to support novel instrumental approaches for the accurate, rapid and<br />

inexpensive evaluation of meat freshness. A pipeline was built for the analysis of<br />

highly heterogeneous data obtained by a diverse range of high-throughput techniques<br />

across four three-class case studies. As a first step, PCA was applied for<br />

dimensionality reduction, feature extraction and exploratory analysis. PLS-DA and<br />

SVMs were employed as classifiers, and classification ensembles implemented as a<br />

means of improving classification accuracy. Rigorous validation and evaluation<br />

methods based on bootstrapping and permutation testing were applied to ensure that<br />

the performance metrics are representative of real-world application, and to ascertain<br />

the statistical significance of the results. This was made possible by the development<br />

of an advanced optimisation approach, which reduced the computational demands of<br />

SVM tuning by up to ~ 90× times. The functionality of the pipeline was further<br />

enhanced by exploiting GPA and CPCA as data fusion techniques, to evaluate whether<br />

better classification accuracy is achieved when integrated as opposed to standalone<br />

datasets are used.<br />

SVM ensembles proved to be the most powerful and accurate classification method<br />

since they produced consistently higher prediction rates ( ) than PLS-DA. Among<br />

the analytical techniques, HPLC was established as the most diagnostic method for the<br />

assessment of meat freshness, with a of 80%. Among the two data fusion<br />

techniques, CPCA outperformed GPA. However, CPCA only exceeded standalone<br />

HPLC in a minority of cases, presenting an overall of 82%.<br />

iii

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