Prediction of brix values of intact peaches with least squares-support vector machine regression models

Second derivative of interactance spectra (731 – 926 nm) of intact peaches and Brix values of extracted juice were used to develop a LS-SVM regression (based on a RBF kernel) and a PLS regression model. An iterative approach was taken with the LS-SVM regression, involving a grid search with application of a gradient based optimization method using a validation set for tuning of hyperparameters, followed by pruning of the LS-SVM model with the optimized hyperparameters. The grid search approach led to five-fold faster and better determination of hyperparameters. Less than 45% of the initial 1430 calibration samples were kept in the models. In prediction of an independent test set with 120 samples, the pruned LS-SVM models performed better than the PLS model (RMSEP decreased by 9 to 14 %).