Comparison of SVM, RF and ELM on an Electronic Nose for the Intelligent Evaluation of Paraffin Samples

Paraffin odor intensity is an important quality indicator when a paraffin inspection is performed. Currently, paraffin odor level assessment is mainly dependent on an artificial sensory evaluation. In this paper, we developed a paraffin odor analysis system to classify and grade four kinds of paraffin samples. The original feature set was optimized using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS). Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) were applied to three different feature data sets for classification and level assessment of paraffin. For classification, the model based on SVM, with an accuracy rate of 100%, was superior to that based on RF, with an accuracy rate of 98.33–100%, and ELM, with an accuracy rate of 98.01–100%. For level assessment, the R(2) related to the training set was above 0.97 and the R(2) related to the test set was above 0.87. Through comprehensive comparison, the generalization of the model based on ELM was superior to those based on SVM and RF. The scoring errors for the three models were 0.0016–0.3494, lower than the error of 0.5–1.0 measured by industry standard experts, meaning these methods have a higher prediction accuracy for scoring paraffin level.