k-NN and k-NN-ANN Combined Classifier to Assess MOX Gas Sensors Performances Affected by Drift Caused by Early Life Aging

The drift of metal oxide semiconductor (MOX) chemical sensors is one of the most importanttopics in this field. The work aims to test the performance of MOX gas sensors over the aging process.Firstly, sensorswere testedwith ethanol to understand their behavior and response changes. In parallel,beers with different alcoholic content were analyzed to assess what happened in a real applicationscenario. With ethanol analysis, it was possible to quantify drift of the baseline of the sensors andchanges that could affect their responses over time (from day 1 to day 51). Conversely, the beer datasethas been exploited to evaluate how two different classifiers perform the classification task based on thealcohol content of the samples. A hybrid k-nearest neighbors artificial neural network (k-NN-ANN)approach and "standard" k-NN were used to evaluate to distinguish among the samples when themeasures were affected by drift. To achieve this goal, data acquired from day one to day six were usedas training to predict data collected up to day 51. Overall, performances of the two methods weresimilar, even if the best result in terms of accuracy is reached by k-NN-ANN (96.51%).