Evaluation of Feature Selection Techniques in a Multifrequency Large Amplitude Pulse Voltammetric Electronic Tongue †

Abstract

An electronic tongue is a device composed of a sensor array that takes advantage of the cross sensitivity property of several sensors to perform classification and quantification in liquid substances. In practice, electronic tongues generate a large amount of information that needs to be correctly analyzed, to define which interactions and features are more relevant to distinguish one substance from another. This work focuses on implementing and validating feature selection methodologies in the liquid classification process of a multifrequency large amplitude pulse voltammetric (MLAPV) electronic tongue. Multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLP NN) and support vector machine (SVM) were used as supervised machine learning classifiers. Different feature selection techniques were used, such as Variance filter, ANOVA F-value, Recursive Feature Elimination and model-based selection. Both 5-fold Cross validation and GridSearchCV were used in order to evaluate the performance of the feature selection methodology by testing various configurations and determining the best one. The methodology was validated in an imbalanced MLAPV electronic tongue dataset of 13 different liquid substances, reaching a 93.85% of classification accuracy.