ABSTRACT
In 1800, the innovation of near-infrared energy was attributed to Herschel. In the meeting of Royal Society of Chemistry in London, the 200th anniversary of this technical breakthrough was celebrated. The credit of invention of near-infrared spectroscopy goes to the researchers of agricultural sciences, especially leading Norris who identified the potential of this technology in early phases of growth of this technology. Qualitative evaluation is the categorization of samples in arrangement to their near-infrared spectra. Clustering techniques such as K-means cluster analysis and fuzzy C-means fall under the umbrella of unsupervised classification methods. The supervised classification methods require both the dependent and independent variables for classification model formulation which is capable of classifying the new samples into the respective classes. These methods include data mining approaches such as support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor, linear discriminant analysis and partial least squares discriminant analysis.
