Development of a Pattern Recognition Tool for the Classification of Electronic Tongue Signals Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Electronic tongue type sensor arrays are made of different materials with the property of capturing signals independently by each sensor. The signals captured when conducting electrochemical tests often have high dimensionality, which increases when performing the data unfolding process. This unfolding process consists of arranging the data coming from different experiments, sensors, and sample times, thus the obtained information is arranged in a two-dimensional matrix. In this work, a description of a tool for the analysis of electronic tongue signals is developed. This tool is developed in Matlab® App Designer, to process and classify the data from different substances analyzed by an electronic tongue type sensor array. The data processing is carried out through the execution of the following stages: (1) data unfolding, (2) normalization, (3) dimensionality reduction, (4) classification through a supervised machine learning model, and finally (5) a cross-validation procedure to calculate a set of classification performance measures. Some important characteristics of this tool are the possibility to tune the parameters of the dimensionality reduction and classifier algorithms, and also plot the two and three-dimensional scatter plot of the features after reduced the dimensionality. This to see the data separability between classes and compatibility in each class. This interface is successfully tested with two electronic tongue sensor array datasets with multi-frequency large amplitude pulse voltammetry (MLAPV) signals. The developed graphical user interface allows comparing different methods in each of the mentioned stages to find the best combination of methods and thus obtain the highest values of classification performance measures.