Discrimination of Different Species of Dendrobium with an Electronic Nose Using Aggregated Conformal Predictor.

A method using electronic nose to discriminate 10 different species of dendrobium, which is a kind of precious herb with medicinal application, was developed with high efficiency and low cost. A framework named aggregated conformal prediction was applied to make predictions with accuracy and reliability for E-nose detection. This method achieved a classification accuracy close to 80% with an average improvement of 6.2% when compared with the results obtained by using traditional inductive conformal prediction. It also provided reliability assessment to show more comprehensive information for each prediction. Meanwhile, two main indicators of conformal predictor, validity and efficiency, were also compared and discussed in this work. The result shows that the approach integrating electronic nose with aggregated conformal prediction to classify the species of dendrobium with reliability and validity is promising.