Gasoline classification using near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy data: Comparison of multivariate techniques

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a non-destructive (vibrational spectroscopy based) measurement technique for many multicomponent chemical systems, including products of petroleum (crude oil) refining and petrochemicals, food products (tea, fruits, e.g., apples, milk, wine, spirits, meat, bread, cheese, etc.), pharmaceuticals (drugs, tablets, bioreactor monitoring, etc.), and combustion products. In this paper we have compared the abilities of nine different multivariate classification methods: linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), regularized discriminant analysis (RDA), soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), partial least squares (PLS) classification, K-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machines (SVM), probabilistic neural network (PNN), and multilayer perceptron (ANN-MLP) - for gasoline classification. Three sets of near infrared (NIR) spectra (450,415, and 345 spectra) were used for classification of gasolines into 3, 6, and 3 classes, respectively, according to their source (refinery or process) and type. The 14,000-8000 cm-1 NIR spectral region was chosen. In all cases NIR spectroscopy was found to be effective for gasoline classification purposes, when compared with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy or gas chromatography (GC). KNN, SVM, and PNN techniques for classification were found to be among the most effective ones. Artificial neural network (ANN-MLP) approach based on principal component analysis (PCA), which was believed to be efficient, has shown much worse results. We hope that the results obtained in this study will help both further chemometric (multivariate data analysis) investigations and investigations in the sphere of applied vibrational (infrared/IR, near-IR, and Raman) spectroscopy of sophisticated multicomponent systems.