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• ML Models for HAB prediction and shellfish farming management decision support. • Study of the importance of variables involved in the forecasting of HAB. • Analysing the behaviour of machine learning models against unbalanced datasets. • Prediction of production cessation by HAB with 91.83% accuracy and 97.34% recall. Mussel farming is one of the most important aquaculture industries. The main risk to mussel farming is harmful algal blooms (HABs), which pose a risk to human consumption. In Galicia, the Spanish main producer of cultivated mussels, the opening and closing of the production areas is controlled by a monitoring program. In addition to the closures resulting from the presence of toxicity exceeding the legal threshold, in the absence of a confirmatory sampling and the existence of risk factors, precautionary closures may be applied. These decisions are made by experts without the support or formalisation of the experience on which they are based. Therefore, this work proposes a predictive model capable of supporting the application of precautionary closures. Achieving sensitivity, accuracy and kappa index values of 97.34%, 91.83% and 0.75 respectively, the kNN algorithm has provided the best results. This allows the creation of a system capable of helping in complex situations where forecast errors are more common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, consumers are more concerned about freshness and quality of food. Poultry egg storage time is a freshness and quality indicator in industrial and consumer applications, even though egg marking is not always required outside the European Union. Other authors have already published works using expensive laboratory equipment in order to determine the storage time and freshness of eggs. This paper presents a novel alternative method based on low-cost devices for the rapid and non-destructive prediction of egg storage time at room temperature (23 ± 1 °C). H&N brown flock with 49-week-old hens were used as a source for the sampled eggs. Samples were scanned for a period of 22 days beginning from the time the egg was laid. The spectral acquisition was performed using a low-cost near-infrared reflectance (NIR) spectrometer which has a wavelength range between 740 nm and 1070 nm. The resulting dataset of 660 samples was randomly split according to a 10-fold cross-validation in order to be used in a contrast and optimization process of two machine learning algorithms. During the optimization, several models were tested to develop a robust calibration model. The best model used a Savitzky Golay pre-processing technique with a third derivative order and an artificial neural network with ten neurons in one hidden layer. Regressing the storage time of the eggs, tests achieved a coefficient of determination ( R-squared ) of 0.8319 ± 0.0377 and a root mean squared error in cross-validation test set ( RMSECV ) of 1.97 days. Although further work is needed, this technique shows industrial potential and consumer utility to determine an egg's freshness using a low-cost spectrometer connected to a smartphone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are episodes of high concentrations of algae that are potentially toxic for human consumption. Mollusc farming can be affected by HABs because, as filter feeders, they can accumulate high concentrations of marine biotoxins in their tissues. To avoid the risk to human consumption, harvesting is prohibited when toxicity is detected. At present, the closure of production areas is based on expert knowledge and the existence of a predictive model would help when conditions are complex and sampling is not possible. Although the concentration of toxin in meat is the method most commonly used by experts in the control of shellfish production areas, it is rarely used as a target by automatic prediction models. This is largely due to the irregularity of the data due to the established sampling programs. As an alternative, the activity status of production areas has been proposed as a target variable based on whether mollusc meat has a toxicity level below or above the legal limit. This new option is the most similar to the actual functioning of the control of shellfish production areas. For this purpose, we have made a comparison between hybrid machine learning models like Neural-Network-Adding Bootstrap (BAGNET) and Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Classification (SVM-KNN) when estimating the state of production areas. The study has been carried out in several estuaries with different levels of complexity in the episodes of algal blooms to demonstrate the generalization capacity of the models in bloom detection. As a result, we could observe that, with an average recall value of 93.41% and without dropping below 90% in any of the estuaries, BAGNET outperforms the other models both in terms of results and robustness. • Presence of toxicity in molluscan shellfish meat as a target for predicting HABs. • Hybrid AI methods outperform classical methods in predicting HABs. • Analyzing the behavior of hybrid machine learning models against unbalanced datasets. • BAGNET offers the best results in the prediction of HABs in complex regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]