Application of Artificial Neural Networks to Assess the Mycological State of Bulk Stored Rapeseeds

Abstract

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) constitute a promising modeling approach that may be used in control systems for postharvest preservation and storage processes. The study investigated the ability of multilayer perceptron and radial-basis function ANNs to predict fungal population levels in bulk stored rapeseeds with various temperatures (T = 12–30 °C) and water activity in seeds (aw = 0.75–0.90). The neural network model input included aw, temperature, and time, whilst the fungal population level was the model output. During the model construction, networks with a different number of hidden layer neurons and different configurations of activation functions in neurons of the hidden and output layers were examined. The best architecture was the multilayer perceptron ANN, in which the hyperbolic tangent function acted as an activation function in the hidden layer neurons, while the linear function was the activation function in the output layer neuron. The developed structure exhibits high prediction accuracy and high generalization capability. The model provided in the research may be readily incorporated into control systems for postharvest rapeseed preservation and storage as a support tool, which based on easily measurable on-line parameters can estimate the risk of fungal development and thus mycotoxin accumulation.