Computer-assisted prediction of pesticide substructure using mass spectra Original Research Article

Mass spectral classifiers of 16 substructures that are present in basic structures of pesticides have been investigated to assist pesticide residues analysis as well as screening of pesticide lead compounds. Mass spectral data are first transformed into 396 features, and then Genetic Algorithm-Partial Least Squares (GA-PLS) as a feature selection method and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a validation method are implemented together to get an optimization feature set for each substructure. At last, a statistical method which is AdaBoost algorithm combined with Classification and Regression Tree (AdaBoost-CART) is trained to predict the 16 substructures presence/absence using the optimization mass spectral feature set. It is demonstrated that the optimum feature sets can be used to predict the 16 pesticide substructures presence/absence with mostly 85–100% in recognition success rate instead of the original 396 features.