Application of multivariate calibration and artificial neural networks to simultaneous kinetic-spectrophotometric determination of carbamate pesticides

Abstract

A method for the simultaneous determination of the pesticides, carbofuran, isoprocarb and propoxur in fruit and vegetable samples has been investigated and developed. It is based on reaction kinetics and spectrophotometry, and results are interpreted with the aid of chemometrics. The analytical method relies on the differential rates of coupling reactions between the hydrolysis product of each carbamate and 4-aminophenol in the presence of potassium periodate in an alkaline solution. The optimized method was successfully tested by analyzing each of the carbamates independently, and linear calibration models are described. For the simultaneous determinations of the carbamates found in ternary mixtures, kinetic and spectral data were processed either by three-way data unfolding method or decomposed by trilinear modeling. Subsequently, 10 different RBF-ANN, PARAFAC and NPLS calibration models were constructed with the use of synthetic ternary mixtures of the three carbamates, and were validated with a separate set of mixtures. The performance of the calibration models was then ranked on the basis of several different figures of merit with the aid of the multi-criteria decision making approach, PROMETHEE and GAIA. RBF-ANN and PC-RBF-ANN were the best performing methods with %Relative Prediction Errors (RPE) in the 3–4% range and Recovery of about 97%. When compared with other recent studies, it was also noted that RBF-ANN has consistently outperformed the more common prediction methods such as PLS and PCR as well as BP-ANN. The successful RBF–ANN method was then applied for the determination of the three carbamate pesticides in purchased vegetable and fruit samples.