Comparison of multivariate calibration and discriminant analysis in evaluating NIR spectroscopy for determination of meat tenderness

Often the primary goal of analytical measurement tasks is not to find good estimates of continuous reference values but rather to determine whether a sample belongs to one of a number of categories or subgroups. In this paper the potential of different statistical techniques in the classification of raw beef samples in tenderness subgroups was studied. The reference values were based on sensory analysis of beef tenderness of 90 samples from bovine M. longissimus dorsi muscles. The sample set was divided into three categories--very tough, intermediate, and very tender--according to degree of tenderness. A training set of samples was used to find the relationship between category and near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopic measurements. The study indicates that classical discriminant analysis has advantages in comparison to multivariate calibration methods [i.e., principal component repression (PCR)], in this application. One reason for this observation seems to be that PCR underestimates high measurement values and overestimates Low values. In this way most samples are assigned to the intermediate group of samples, causing a small number of erroneous classifications for the intermediate subgroup, but a large number of errors for the two extreme groups. With the use of PCR the number of correct classifications in the extreme subgroups was as love as 23%, while the use of discriminate analysis increased this number to almost 60%. The number of classifications in correct or neighbor subgroup for the two extreme subgroups was equal to 97%. A ''bias-correction'' was also attempted for PCR, and this gave results comparable to the best results obtained by discriminant analysis methods. Test sets used NTR analysis of fresh, raw beef samples with different processing. While this spectroscopic approach had previously been shown to be useful with frozen products, it appears unsuitable at this time for fresh beef. However, its marginal analytical utility proved useful in evaluating the two classification approaches employed in this study.