Data mining techniques were applied to predict raw milk quality in terms of methylene blue reduction time (MBRT) from the independent parameters of raw milk inspection parameters such as travel time, temperature of milk, solid-not-fat, %fat, acidity and specific gravity. Predictive models were developed and the performance of 3 data mining algorithms namely; Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and K-Nearest neighbor (KNN), was measured in terms of average error and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). MLR showed high and inconsistent RMS error in 3 randomly picked data partitions whereas KNN and ANN were able to predict the MBRT values from the physico-chemical quality parameters, KNN was the preferred algorithm (K=7, RMSE of 1.7). The models were applied to a new set of data (n=78) without showing them the output parameter (MBRT). The predicted values of MBRT were plotted against the actual observed values to classify milk into 4 quality grades.

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Integrated management of forest ecosystems requires an accurate and all-sided mastery of the forest information, of which forest ecosystem cover especially at tree species level is the most basic and important component. The study investigated and demonstrated the mapping potential of the forest ecosystem at tree species level from high spatial resolution hyperspectral images. The mapping performances of eight conventional classification methods including Maximum Likelihood (ML), Mahalanobis Distance (MaD), Minimum Distance (MD), Parallelepiped (P), Binary Encoding (BE), Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), Spectral Information Divergence (SID) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), were verified based on two noise treatments (noise fraction and noise removal) and three leaf growth periods (tender leaf period, young leaf period and adult leaf period). It could be confirmed that noise removal obviously contributed to improving the classification agreement and young leaf period was most suitable for mapping forest ecosystem at tree species level from high spatial resolution hyperspectral images. ML, P, BE and SID were not considered appropriate according to good results with overall accuracy and kappa coefficient exceeding 85% and 0.80 respectively. Though MD also produced a very high classification agreement, it could not cover up its poor potential to identify tree species by spectral features. Even if SVML, SVMP, SVMR and SVMS performed the stablest and could generate good results across three periods, the best result was obtained by SAM. Except that the difference was significant between MD and SVMS at the 5% significance level in tender leaf period, the comparative tests did not provide more proof to show the significant difference between the methods considered appropriate.

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