Classification of Different Blueberry Cultivars by Analysis of Physical Factors, Chemical and Nutritional Ingredients, and Antioxidant Capacities

Abstract

Blueberry fruits of different cultivars are featured with different quality indices. In this work, three types of quality factors, including 6 physical parameters, 12 chemical and nutritional components, and 3 antioxidant indices, were measured to compare and classify blueberry fruits from 12 different cultivars in China. Using the autoscaled data of quality factors, unsupervised principal component analysis was performed for exploratory analysis of intercultivar differences and the influences of quality factors. A supervised classification method, partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA), was combined with the global particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) and two multiclass strategies, one-versus-rest (OVR) and one-versus-one (OVO), to select discriminative quality factors and develop classification models of the 12 cultivars. As a result, OVO-PLSDA with 8 quality factors could achieve the classification accuracy of 0.915. This study will provide new insights into the quality variations and key factors among different blueberry cultivars.