Machine learning identification of edible vegetable oils from fatty acid compositions and hyperspectral images

Hyperspectral imaging analysis combined with machine learning was applied to identify eight edible vegetable oils, and its classification performance was compared with the chemical method based on fatty acid compositions. Furthermore, the degree of adulteration in vegetable oils was quantitatively investigated using machine learning-enabled hyperspectral approaches. The hyperspectral absorbance spectra of palm oil with a high degree of saturation were distinctly different from those of the other liquid oils. The flaxseed and olive oils exhibited the dominant hyperspectral intensities at 1170/1671 and 1212/1415 nm, respectively. Linear discriminant analysis demonstrated that two linear discriminants could explain a significant portion of the total variability, accounting for 96.0% (fatty acid compositions) and 98.9% (hyperspectral images). When the hyperspectral results were used as datasets for three machine learning models (decision tree, random forest, and k-nearest neighbor), several instances to incorrectly classify grapeseed and sunflower oils were detected, while olive, palm, and flaxseed oils were successfully identified. The machine learning models showed a great classification performance that exceeded 98.9% from the hyperspectral images of the vegetable oils, which was comparable to the fatty acid composition-based chemical method in identifying edible vegetable oils. In addition, the random forest model was the most effective in ascertaining adulteration levels in binary oil blends (R2 > 0.992 and RMSE < 2.75). [Display omitted] •Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) was coupled to machine learning (ML) for identifying oils.•Two linear discriminants explained 98.9% of the total variation in the HSI datasets.•Random forest ML model offered performance advantages in the oil classification tasks.•HSI-based ML showed the classification performance comparable to the chemical method.