DETECTION OF ADULTERATION IN COCONUT MILK USING CUCKOO SEARCH-OPTIMIZED XGBOOST ON HIGH-DIMENSIONAL FTIR SPECTRAL DATA

Coconut milk adulteration is an important issue because it can reduce food quality and endanger consumers. This study aims to develop a rapid and accurate detection method for coconut milk adulteration using a combination of FTIR spectroscopy technology and the XGBoost machine learning algorithm optimized with the Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA). FTIR spectral data from traditional and instant coconut milk samples were analyzed using Standard Normal Variate (SNV) and Savitzky-Golay (SG) preprocessing to reduce noise and clarify spectral features. The XGBoost model was then optimized through CSA with hyperparameter tuning. The results showed that the combination of SNV+SG preprocessing increased the model accuracy by 84.44%, with a precision of 92.73% and an F1-score of 79.94%. In addition, CSA optimization provided a 19.7% increase in accuracy compared to the model without tuning. These findings prove the effectiveness of the CSA-XGBoost approach in analyzing high-dimensional spectral data and is a potential solution in efficiently detecting the authenticity of coconut milk. In conclusion, this approach has the potential to be widely applied to test the authenticity of other food products quickly, non-destructively and accurately.