Advanced predictive methods for wine age prediction: Part II – A comparison study of multiblock regression approaches

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In this article, we extend the scope of the first paper of the sequel, which was dedicated to the analysis of advanced single-block regression methods (Rendall et al., 2016) [1], to the class of multiblock regression approaches. The datasets contemplated for developing the multiblock approaches are the same as in the former publication: volatile, polyphenols, organic acids composition and the UV–Vis spectra. The context is still the prediction of the ageing time of one of finest Portuguese fortified wines, the Madeira Wine, but now the data collected from the different analytical sources is explored simultaneously, in a more structured and informative way, through multiblock methodologies. The goal of this paper is to provide a critical assessment of a rich variety of multiblock regression methods, namely: Concatenated PLS, Multiblock PLS (MBPLS), Hierarchical PLS (HPLS), Network-Induced Supervised Learning (NI-SL) and Sequential Orthogonalised Partial Least Squares (SO-PLS). A comparison of block scaling methods was also undertaken for the Concatenated PLS algorithm, and new block scaling methods were proposed that led to better prediction performances. This study explores and reveals the potential advantages of applying multiblock methods for fusing datasets from different sources, from both the predictive and interpretability perspectives.