Chemical Gas Sensor Drift Compensation Using Classifier Ensembles Vergara 2012
Chemical Gas Sensor Drift Compensation Using Classifier Ensembles Vergara 2012
Chemical Gas Sensor Drift Compensation Using Classifier Ensembles Vergara 2012
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: Sensor drift remains to be the most challenging problem in chemical sensing. To address this problem we
Received 27 September 2011 have collected an extensive dataset for six different volatile organic compounds over a period of three
Received in revised form years under tightly controlled operating conditions using an array of 16 metal-oxide gas sensors. The
26 November 2011
recordings were made using the same sensor array and a robust gas delivery system. To the best of our
Accepted 17 January 2012
knowledge, this is one of the most comprehensive datasets available for the design and development
Available online 1 March 2012
of drift compensation methods, which is freely reachable on-line. We introduced a machine learning
approach, namely an ensemble of classifiers, to solve a gas discrimination problem over extended periods
Keywords:
Sensor drift
of time with high accuracy rates. Experiments clearly indicate the presence of drift in the sensors during
Metal-oxide sensors the period of three years and that it degrades the performance of the classifiers. Our proposed ensemble
Time series classification method based on support vector machines uses a weighted combination of classifiers trained at different
Ensemble methods points of time. As our experimental results illustrate, the ensemble of classifiers is able to cope well with
Support vector machines sensor drift and performs better than the baseline competing methods.
© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Drift has plagued the sensor research community for many
years, deteriorating the performance of classifiers used for gas
In the history of sensors’ development, the electronic noses, or recognition and augmenting the maintenance costs of chemo-
simply e-noses, are a relatively new addition to the world of sensors, sensory systems, or artificial electronic noses, during real-time
and can be defined as a collection of broadly cross-reactive sensors operations. In general, sensor drift can be attributed to two
connected to electronics and an effective pattern recognition sys- predominant sources [8,9]. First, the ‘real-drift’ (a.k.a. first-order
tem used to detect, classify, and, where necessary, quantify a variety drift) due to the chemical and physical interaction processes
of chemical analytes or odors of concern in a certain area [1,2]. Ide- of the chemical analytes, in gas phase, occurring at the sensing
ally, these systems would greatly benefit from chemical sensors film microstructure, such as aging (e.g. the reorganization of the
that would always show an identical response when exposed to sensor surface over long periods of time) and poisoning (e.g.,
the same analyte or a chemical mixture and return to their baseline irreversible binding due to external contamination). And second,
level immediately after the gas being evaluated is no longer present the ‘second-order drift’ (or measurement system drift, among
at the sensor surface. However, in real-life applications, where sen- many other names), produced by the external and uncontrollable
sors are operated over a long period of time, such an ideal situation alterations of the experimental operating system, including, but
is still largely unrealizable today [3]. The gradual and unpredictable not limited to, changes in the environment (e.g., temperature and
variation of the chemo-sensory signal responses when exposed to humidity variations); measurement delivery system noise (e.g.,
the same analyte under identical conditions, a.k.a. sensor drift, has tubes condensation, sample conditioning, etc.); and thermal and
long been recognized as one of the most serious impairments faced memory effects (e.g., hysteresis or remnants of previous gases). In
by chemical sensors [4–7]. general, a number of approaches under the notion of sensor drift
counteraction have been implemented in the literature, but one of
the pioneering works, and perhaps the most systematic sensor drift
analysis was performed by Romain and co-workers [10,11], who
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 8585346758; fax: +1 8585347664. utilized a very comprehensive dataset, collected over long periods
E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Vergara). of time in real operating conditions, to provide a deep insight into
1
Joint first authors.
2 the sensor drift problem, for both the real and second-order drift.
Tuba Ayhan carried out most of her work on this article while visiting the Bio-
Circuits Institute at UCSD. Among the many interesting conclusions drawn from that work,
0925-4005/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.snb.2012.01.074
A. Vergara et al. / Sensors and Actuators B 166–167 (2012) 320–329 321
the following three aspects were emphasized: (i) from all the ensemble method used in this paper complements, rather than
sensing technologies available, metal oxide based gas sensors [12] competes against, the existent component correction methods
remain the best option for long term applications for continuous mentioned above; since component correction methods are essen-
monitoring systems; (ii) a calibration gas is recommended to tially a pre-processing technique, we can indeed use the ensemble
estimate sensor drift compensation, and (iii), sensor replacement method on the pre-processed data, too. In the remainder of this
is unavoidable over long periods of time. paper, we first describe the experimental setup, the dataset, and
In practical applications, it is difficult to empirically differentiate the feature extraction methods considered in this work (Section
between real drift and second-order drift, if possible at all. Accord- 2). We then describe the drift compensation algorithm (Section
ingly, it is hard to develop methods to correct different sources 3), followed by a detailed description of our experimental find-
of drift because the origin of it cannot be ascertained. Utilizing an ings (Section 4). And finally, we present the concluding comments
effective delivery system allows the chemical sensors to bypass the drawn from the results presented in this paper (Section 5).
second-order drift effect, making it possible to exclusively concen-
trate on the chemical sensors for compensating real drift. In our
2. Data collection
particular gas delivery system, we can control the second-order
drift, too, so we can exclusively address the real drift problem. Thus,
We apply our drift compensation method to an extensive
in the remainder of this document we use the term drift to refer to
dataset3 recorded by a metal-oxide gas sensor array. In this
real drift. Concerning real drift reduction, many efforts have been
section, we describe the experimental setup, the recording pro-
devoted to find the sensor materials that can reversibly interact
tocol, and the signal processing algorithms used for feature
with the gas so that the detected molecules unbind the sensor mate-
extraction.
rial as soon as the gas has been purged out from the sensor surface
[13–15]. Other solutions based on periodically changing the sen-
sor working temperature [16,17] have also been implemented in 2.1. The experimental setup
an effort to minimize the effects of irreversibility in the sensors’
responses due to poisoning. Undoubtedly, heightened reversibility We used a sixteen screen-printed commercially available
in the sensor response is necessary for the effective drift counterac- metal-oxide semiconductor gas sensors array, manufactured and
tion. However, this general treatment only constitutes one facet of commercialized by Figaro Inc. [12], for our experiments. The
the problem—the so-called short-term drift—a substantial study of custom design used in the sensing technology includes an indepen-
the sensor variability over longer periods of time is also necessary. dently controlled RuO2 (Ruthenium Oxide) electrical heating line
The most commonly used solutions to cope with sensor drift and a metal oxide semiconductor film as a sensor material printed
within the chemical sensing community are univariate and multi- onto the measuring electrodes (noble metal). The obtained sensor
variate methods, where drift compensation is performed either on element is mounted onto an alumina substrate and then connected
each sensor individually or on the entire sensor array [9,18]. Among by lead wires to the pins of the sensor package. The resulting array,
the multivariate drift compensation methods, unsupervised com- populated by sensor devices (4 of each) tagged by the manufacturer
ponent correction techniques are the most popular [4,19,20]. These as TGS2600, TGS2602, TGS2610, TGS2620 is placed into a 60 ml-
techniques rely on finding linear transformations that normalize volume test chamber, where the odorants of interest, in gaseous
the sensor responses across time so that a classifier can be directly form, are to be injected for trials. To generate the required dataset,
applied to the resulting stationary data. For instance, the compo- we connect the said test chamber to a computer-controlled con-
nent correction method presented by Årtusson et al. [4] applies tinuous flow system, which provides versatility for conveying the
the following transformation to the measurement/data matrix chemical compounds of interest at the desired concentrations to
X ← X − (X · c)c , where c is the principal component vector(s) of the the sensing chamber with high accuracy and in a highly repro-
measurements computed using a reference gas that may approx- ducible way while keeping the total flow constant. In particular,
imate the drift direction. The main drawback of these techniques our system utilizes three digital, computed-supervised mass flow
is that they assume the drift direction to be linear in the feature controllers (MFCs) (provided by Bronkhorst High-Tech B.V. [26]),
space and, therefore, a linear transformation of the data suffices each of them with different maximum flow levels (200, 100, and
to correct it. While it is entirely plausible that kernelized versions 20 ml/min, ±1% of accuracy). Such devices connect to different pres-
of component analysis, such as kernel principal component anal- surized gas cylinders, which contain, diluted in dry air, either the
ysis [21], can be applied to account for non-linearities in the drift carrier gas or the chemical analytes to be measured. To maintain
direction, these techniques have not been investigated much in the the moisture level constant at 10% R.H. (measured at 25 ± 1 ◦ C) dur-
chemical sensing community. Also, with the exception of Ref. [20], ing the entire measurement process, we utilize synthetic dry air
these techniques require a reference gas that is used to approximate as background for all measurements, provided by Airgas Inc. [27].
the drift direction by assuming that the reference gas provides the Then, the analytes under analysis (i.e., ammonia, acetaldehyde, ace-
drift direction in all the other gases. tone, ethylene, ethanol, and toluene) are added to this background
In this paper, we take a completely different approach to solve in random order. The total flow rate across the sensing chamber is
the mentioned problem, in which we do not make any of the above- set to 200 ml/min and kept constant for the whole measurement
mentioned assumptions. Instead, we use a supervised machine process. The response of the gas sensor array was measured when
learning method, namely, an ensemble of classifiers to cope with the operating temperature of sensors was fixed at 400 ◦ C, which,
sensor drift. To the best of our knowledge, such a machine learning according to the deterministic one-to-one look-up table provided
approach, that automatically detects and copes with sensor drift, by the manufacturer [12], is attained via a built-in heater that is
has not been applied in the chemical sensing community before, driven by an external DC voltage source set at 5 V. Finally, to ensure
although it has been shown to yield promising results on prob- that reproducible response patterns are acquired during each mea-
lems with drifting concepts in machine learning and data mining surement, the sensors were pre-heated for several days prior the
[22–25]. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset of a multi-component experiment process gets started.
gas classification problem recorded from metal-oxide gas sen-
sors over a course of 36 months, we investigate the feasibility
of our ensemble of classifiers methodology to mitigate the drift 3
The dataset will be made available on the UCI repository upon acceptance of the
effect in chemical gas sensors. It is important to note that the paper.
322 A. Vergara et al. / Sensors and Actuators B 166–167 (2012) 320–329
Fig. 1. Experimental setup used for data acquisition. The sensor responses are recorded in the presence of the analyte in gaseous form diluted at different concentrations
in dry air. The measurement system operates in a fully computerized environment with minimal human intervention, which provides versatility in conveying the odors of
interest (at the desired concentrations) to the sensing chamber with high accuracy, and simultaneously in keeping constant the total flow. Therefore, no changes in the flow
or flow dynamics are reflected in the sensor response (i.e., only the presence of an odorant will be reflected in the sensor response). Moreover, since the system continuously
supplies gas to the sensing chamber (either clean dry air or a chemical component), the amount of gas molecules in the sensing chamber is homogeneously distributed.
The sensor response is read-out in the form of the resistance discriminate the six different analytes regardless of their con-
across the active layer of each sensor; hence each measurement centration. The odor identity and concentration values in
produces a 16-channel time series sequence. The data acquisition parts-per-million by volume (ppmv) are listed in Table 1.
board collects the data from the gas sensors and controls the analog Each of the possible gas type-concentration pairs was sampled
voltage signal to every sensor heater. This voltage is used to con- in no particular order. The resulting dataset consists of 13,910
trol and vary the sensor heater’s operating temperature utilizing a recordings (time series sequences) collected over a period of 36
made-in-home, LabVIEW [28] environment program running on a months. The exact distribution of the number of measurements
PC platform. The experimental setup is illustrated in the diagram per month is shown in Table 2. Notice that some of the months
shown in Fig. 1. shown in the table do not contain any of the measurements for
one or more gases; other gas analytes and/or complex mixtures
2.2. The dataset that are not considered in this study were collected during this
specific period of time utilizing the same array of sensors and exper-
Our dataset consists of a six-gas/analyte classification prob- imental apparatus, which in turn increased the complexity of the
lem dosed at different concentrations, in which the goal is to problem due to interference from these external analytes that may
A. Vergara et al. / Sensors and Actuators B 166–167 (2012) 320–329 323
Table 1
Analytes and concentrations in the dataset.
Ammonia 50, 60, 70, 75, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 125, 130, 140, 150, 160, 170, 175, 180, 190, 200, 210, 220, 225, 230, 240, 250, 260, 270, 275, 280, 290, 300, 350,
400, 450, 500, 600, 700, 750, 800, 900, 950, 1000
Acetaldehyde 5, 10, 13, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 60, 70, 75, 80, 90, 100, 120, 125, 130, 140, 150, 160, 170, 175, 180, 190, 200, 210, 220, 225, 230, 240, 250, 275, 300,
500
Acetone 12, 25, 38, 50, 60, 62, 70, 75, 80, 88, 90, 100, 110, 120, 125, 130, 140, 150, 170, 175, 180, 190, 200, 210, 220, 225, 230, 240, 250, 260, 270, 275, 280, 290,
300, 350, 400, 450, 500, 1000
Ethylene 10, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50, 60, 70, 75, 90, 100, 110, 120, 125, 130, 140, 150, 160, 170, 175, 180, 190, 200, 210, 220, 225, 230, 240, 250, 275, 300
Ethanol 10, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 75, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 125, 130, 140, 150, 160, 170, 175, 180, 190, 200, 210, 220, 225, 230, 240, 250, 275, 500, 600
Toluene 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100
Table 2
Dataset details. Each row corresponds to samples collected during a period of one month for six gases.
month1 76 0 0 88 84 0 248
month2 7 30 70 10 6 74 197
month3 0 0 7 140 70 0 217
month4 0 4 0 170 82 5 261
month8 0 0 0 20 0 0 20
month9 0 0 0 4 11 0 15
month10 100 105 525 0 1 0 731
month11 0 0 0 146 360 0 506
month12 0 192 0 334 0 0 526
month13 216 48 275 10 5 0 554
month14 0 18 0 43 52 0 113
month15 12 12 12 0 12 0 48
month16 20 46 63 40 28 0 197
month17 0 0 0 20 0 0 20
month18 0 0 0 3 0 0 3
month19 110 29 140 100 264 9 652
month20 0 0 466 451 250 458 1625
month21 360 744 630 662 649 568 3613
month22 25 15 123 0 0 0 163
month23 15 18 20 30 30 18 131
month24 0 25 28 0 0 1 54
month30 100 50 50 55 61 100 416
month36 600 600 600 600 600 600 3600
potentially affect the sensor life. Additionally, as observed in complete, divided into 100 s for the gas injection phase and at least
Table 2, the last batch of recordings, which contains 3600 mea- 200 s for the recovery (cleaning) phase. For processing purposes,
surements from the same analytes, was purposely collected five we considered the whole sensor response after subtracting the
months after the sensors had been powered off. This 5-month gap baseline from each record. The sampling rate was set to 100 Hz.
is extremely significant for this study not only because it allows Finally, the measurement process herein described was replicated
us to validate our suggested method on the annotated set of mea- for subsequent measurements.
surements collected five months later, but also because it is during
this period of time that the sensors were prompted to severe con-
2.3. Data processing and feature extraction
tamination since external interferents could easily and irreversibly
get attached to the sensing layer due to the lack of the operating
The Figaro metal-oxide gas sensors are known to have a slow
temperature.
response to a chemical analyte. This response, under tightly con-
To generate the dataset, we followed a measurement procedure
trolled operating conditions (i.e., constant air flow and fixed
consisting of the following steps. First, a constant flow of zero-grade
operating temperature), typically involves a monotonically saturat-
dry air was circulated through the sensing chamber while the gas
ing smooth change in the conductance/resistance across its sensing
sensor array was kept at a stable operating temperature (400 ◦ C).4
layer due to the adsorption/desorption reactions of the chemical
This step was done to measure the baseline steady-state sensor
analyte occurring at the micro-porous surface of the sensor. The
response (i.e., the sensor response in the presence of no chemical
amount and speed of these reactions depend on (i) the analyte iden-
analytes). Afterwards, the desired concentration of the odorant was
tity, (ii) the analyte concentration, (iii) the active layer (i.e., sensor
injected by the continuous flow system into the sensing chamber.
type), and (iv) the surface temperature (i.e., the sensors’ operating
Finally, in the third step (cleaning phase) the vapor was vacuumed
temperature). Since the last two factors are fixed throughout the
away from the sensor array and the test chamber was cleaned
entire measurement procedure of this analysis, the sensor-analyte
with dry air before the concentration phase of a new measurement.
identity/concentration interaction process becomes the only factor
The acquisition time of these measurements took at least 300 s to
that, as a pair, shapes the response profile, and, thus, that defines the
identity of the chemical analyte of interest [29]. Accordingly, fea-
tures reflecting the whole sensing dynamics at the sensor surface
4
We do not have access to the actual sensing surface temperature due to packag-
are of special interest in our drift compensation analysis.
ing, but a look-up table relating it to the heater voltage can be found upon request Feature extraction plays an important role in every chemo-
in Ref. [12]. sensory application [30]; it is defined as a transformation mapping
324 A. Vergara et al. / Sensors and Actuators B 166–167 (2012) 320–329
(a)
Response (Ω)
6000
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100
Features considered in the rising portion Features considered in the decaying portion
of the sensor response of the sensor response
(b) (e)
1 1
Maximum values of the ema
α=0.001
Minimum values of the ema
α=0.001
emamax
min
0 0
max ema
ema
α=0.001
min emaα=0.001
−1 −1
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100
(c) (f)
2 2
emaα=0.01
α=0.01
1 max ema
α=0.01
max
min
0
ema
0 min ema
α=0.01
−1 −2
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100
(d) 2 (g) 2
max emaα=0.1
emaα=0.1
emaα=0.1
max
min
0 0
min ema
α=0.1
−2 −2
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100
Time (s)
Fig. 2. Panel (a), typical response of a metal-oxide based chemical sensor to 30 ppmv of Acetaldehyde. The curve shows the three phases of a measurement: baseline
measurement (made with pure air), test gas measurement (when the chemical analyte is injected, in gas form, to the test chamber), and recovery phase (during which the
sensor again is exposed to pure air; the recovery time is usually much longer that the gas injection phase). Panels (b)–(d), exponential moving average of the rising portion
of the sensor response (gas injection) for ˛ = 0.1, ˛ = 0.01, and ˛ = 0.001. The maximum values of the graphs (i.e., max ema˛ r[k]), represent the features extracted from the
k
chemical sensor in response to the analyte. Panels (e)–(g), exponential moving average of the decaying portion of the sensor response (cleaning phase) for ˛ = 0.1, ˛ = 0.01,
and ˛ = 0.001. The minimum values of the graphs (i.e., min ema˛ r[k]), are the features we extracted to represent the sensor signal during its cleaning phase. Features are
k
marked with red circles in the plot. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of the article.)
the sensor response to a space of lower dimension preserving the On the other hand, we also extract an aggregate of features
most meaningful portion of information contained in the original reflecting the sensor dynamics of the increasing/decaying transient
sensor signal. In this work, we consider two distinct types of fea- portion of the sensor response during the entire measurement pro-
tures that exploit the whole dynamic processes occurring at the cedure under controlled conditions. In particular, we utilize the
sensor surface, including the ones that reflect its adsorption, des- exponential moving average (ema˛ ), a transform borrowed from
orption, and steady-state (or final) responses of the sensor element. the field of econometrics originally introduced to the chemical sen-
On the one hand, we utilize the steady-state feature, which is the sor community in [32] that converts the increasing/decaying and
“gold-standard” for chemo-sensory feature extraction [31]. It is saturating discrete time series r[·] collected from the chemical sen-
defined as the difference of the maximal resistance change and the sor into a real scalar f˛ {r[·]}, by estimating the maximum value (or
baseline, minimum for the decaying portion of the sensor response) of its
exponential moving average transform (ema˛ ), calculated by,
R = maxr[k] − minr[k], (1)
k k y[k] = (1 − ˛)y[k − 1] + ˛(r[k] − r[k − 1]), (3)
and its normalized version expressed by the ratio of the maximal where k = 1, 2, . . ., T, y[0], its initial condition, set to zero (y[0] = 0),
resistance and the baseline values, and the scalar ˛ (˛ ∈ {0, 1}) being a smoothing parameter of the
operator that defines both the quality of the feature f˛ {r[·]} and
maxk r[k] − mink r[k] the time of its occurrence along the time series.5 In this work,
||R|| = , (2) we set three different values for ˛ (˛ = 0.1, ˛ = 0.01, and ˛ = 0.001)
mink r[k]
the sensor response and three additional features with the same
We used this strategy in all our experiments due to its simplic-
˛ values for the decaying portion of the sensor response, cov-
ity and ease of implementation. Most importantly, we can directly
ering thus the entire sensor response. Fig. 2 shows the typical
use the output of existing software—for instance, the widely used
signal response of a chemical sensor in the presence of 30 ppmv
LibSVM [35]—to estimate the weights without the need to solve an
of Acetaldehyde and its ema˛ representation for the three different
additional optimization problem.
˛ values. Finally, as this figure illustrates, by applying the above-
mentioned transform to each of the 16 channels (sensors) in the
pre-recorded time-series, we map the sensor array response into 4. Experimental results
a 128-dimensional feature vector, which resulted from a combina-
tion of the 8 features described above ×16 sensors (see Table 3). In all our experiments, we trained multi-class SVMs (one-vs-
For a more detailed discussion on these features, the readers are one strategy) with RBF kernel using the publicly available LibSVM
referred to Ref. [32]. software [35]. The features in the training and test datasets were
scaled appropriately to lie between −1 and +1. The kernel band-
3. Drift compensation method width parameter and the SVM C parameter were chosen using
10-fold cross validation by performing a grid search in the range
We use an ensemble of classifiers [22,24,25] to detect and cope [2−10 , 2−9 , . . ., 24 , 25 ] and [2−5 , 2−4 , . . ., 29 , 210 ], respectively.
with sensor drift. Consider a binary classification problem with a set We first established the fact that the sensors are drifting and that
of features x as inputs and a class label (a gas/analyte in our prob- the drift is degrading the performance of classifiers. We trained a
lem) y as output. At every time step t, we receive a batch of examples multi-class classifier on data collected during the first two months
St = {(x1 , y1 ), . . . , (xmt , ymt )} of size mt . We train a classifier ft (x), and tested it on data from the remaining months. Details on the
for example a support vector machine (SVM) [33], using the cur- number of measurements collected during each month for a period
rent batch of examples. The final classifier ht+1 (x) at time step (t + 1) of three years is given in Table 2.
t
is a weighted combination of classifiers, i.e., ht+1 (x) = ˇ f (x),
i=1 i i The classifier’s performance measured in terms of prediction
where {ˇ1 , . . ., ˇt } is the set of classifier weights. Under the assump- accuracy is shown in Fig. 3. We see that the performance gradually
tion that the distribution of examples in the current batch St has not degrades with time, which in turn serves as a clear indicator of
changed much from those in the previous batch St−1 , we use the sensor drift and the way it has affected the accuracy of the classifier.
examples in batch St to estimate the weights {ˇ1 , . . ., ˇt }. There are Notice as well that on month 18 (ID: month18, in Table 2), we have
several ways to estimate these weights. A simple and intuitive way only 3 measurements from class 4 (ethylene) and, therefore, the
is to assign weights to classifiers according to their prediction per- performance suddenly rises to 100%. We consider this issue to be
formance on batch St . Alternatively, we could solve an optimization an exception.
problem such as We then considered four settings as described below:
⎛ ⎞2
mt
t
1: for t = 1, . . . , T do
2: Receive St = {(x1 , y1 ), . . . , (xmt , ymt )}
3: Train a classifier (SVM) on St
4: Estimate the weights {ˇ1 , . . . , ˇt } using one of the techniques
described in the text
5: end for
6: Output final classifier: {ˇ1 , . . . , ˇT } and {f1 , . . . , fT }
Table 4
Data set details. Each row corresponds to months that were combined to form a
batch.
Table 5
Performance of the classifiers trained on batches 1–9 and tested on successive batches.
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
batch1 74.36 61.03 50.93 18.27 28.26 28.81 20.07 34.26 34.48
batch2 87.83 90.68 72.08 44.52 42.46 29.93 59.57 39.69
batch3 90.06 94.92 70.96 73.73 62.59 65.74 38.89
batch4 56.35 27.52 35.40 19.73 17.02 17.56
batch5 42.52 41.32 13.95 21.49 20.11
batch6 83.53 88.44 65.74 49.97
batch7 91.84 69.15 54.28
batch8 62.98 37.69
batch9 22.64
automatically detect and cope with sensor drift. Fig. 6 shows how
the classifier weights used in the ensemble change with time.
• Finally, although the component correction method (Setting 4)
helped to slightly improve the performance of SVM trained in
Setting 1, it performed worse than all the other methods on most
of the batches. Note that we applied the component correction
method six times by treating every one of our six gases as a ref-
erence gas. In Fig. 5, we plot only the results obtained from the
best reference gas, i.e., at every batch/time point, we apply the
component correction method six times and report the best per-
formance in terms of classifier accuracy. Fig. 7 shows the results
for all the reference gases.
5. Conclusions
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and devices for air quality monitoring, including the JPL ENose, silicon carbide Ramón Huerta (Ph.D., 1994 – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) is an Associate
hydrocarbon sensors and colorimetric sensors for ozone and other oxidants, and (b) Research Scientist at the BioCircuits Institute, UC San Diego. His areas of exper-
investigations of metals and metal alloys for use in high temperature energy con- tise include dynamic systems, artificial intelligence, and Neuroscience. His work
version devices, including the Alkali Metal Thermal to Electric Converter (AMTEC) deals with the development algorithms for the discrimination and quantifica-
and thermoelectric devices. Amy is now working at the U.S. Department of tion of complex multidimensional times series, model building to understand the
Energy. information processing in the brain, and chemical sensing and machine olfaction
applications based on bio-inspired technology. Ramón has co-authored over 80 arti-
Margie L. Homer (Ph.D., 1993 – University of California Los Angeles) is an Associate cles in peer-reviewed journals at the intersection of computer science, physics, and
Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technol- biology.
ogy. Physical Chemist Margie Homer is the Co-Investigator of the Electronic Nose
project at JPL. Her research interest includes chemical sensors.