Finding the Most Significant Elements for the Classification of Organic Orange Leaves: A Data Mining Approach

ABSTRACTBrazil is the world’s largest producer of oranges. The Brazilian conventional citrus crop requires repeated application of agrochemicals to achieve satisfactory levels of productivity. The organic citriculture is an alternative production system, which is environmentally friendly and offers a safe food to consumers. However, it is difficult to determine if a food or plant was cultivated in organic or conventional system by just common observation, which makes the customers of organic food market vulnerable against fraudulent entrepreneurs. In this study, we present a data mining approach for the study of Brazilian organic citrus leaves which can aid in the certification of authenticity of the citrus leaves. The elemental composition is determined by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). We developed classification models based on support vector machines and artificial neural networks capable of predicting whether a citrus leaf is organic or conventional through analysis of the con...