Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248

www.elsevier.com/locate/jfoodeng

Prediction of pores formation (porosity) in foods during drying:

generic models by the use of hybrid neural network
M.A. Hussain a, M. Sha®ur Rahman b,*
, C.W. Ng a

a
Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, Malaysia
b
Department of Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, and Department of Food Science and Nutrition, College of Agriculture,
Sultan Qaboos University, P.O. Box 34, Al-Khod 123, Muscat, Oman
Received 14 October 2000; accepted 7 March 2001

Abstract
General porosity prediction models of food during air-drying have been developed using regression analysis and hybrid neural
network techniques. Porosity data of apple, carrot, pear, potato, starch, onion, lentil, garlic, calamari, squid, and celery were used to
develop the model using 286 data points obtained from the literature. The best generic model was developed based on four inputs as
temperature of drying, moisture content, initial porosity, and product type. The error for predicting porosity using the best generic
model developed is 0.58%, thus identi®ed as an accurate prediction model. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Generic model; Hybrid neural network; Air drying; Porosity; Density; Thermal conductivity

1. Introduction
Pores or bubbles occur in diverse food products, and
the issues of pores or bubbles in foods are generic, such
as carbonated drinks, beers, ice creams, cakes, biscuits,
breads, breakfast cereals, extruded and dried products.
The prediction of pore formation in foods during pro-
cessing is needed for process design, in estimating other
properties, and characterizing the quality of a product
(Rahman, 2001). Simultaneous heat and mass transfer
are involved in food processing operations, such as
drying, smoking, blanching, baking, frying, evaporative
cooling, extrusion and cooking. In these processes,
foods undergo volume changes either by shrinkage due
to moisture loss or by expansion due to gas generation
or pore formation.
Porosity has a direct e€ect on the other physical
properties, such as mass di€usion coecient, thermal
conductivity, and thermal di€usivity. Mechanical and
textural properties of food are also correlated to the
porosity. Vincent (1989) found that torsional sti€ness
(0.5±7 MPa) varied with the porosity (0.83±0.54) in case
of fresh apple. They found that sti€ness showed a linear
* ples are linear (Madamba, Driscoll, & Buckle, 1994;
Corresponding author. Tel.: +986-515-236, fax: +986-513-418.
E-mail addresses: azlan@fk.um.edu.my (M.A. Hussain), sha-
®ur@squ.edu.om (M. Sha®ur Rahman), ngcwei98@yahoo.com
(C.W. Ng).
0260-8774/01/$ - see front matter Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 2 6 0 - 8 7 7 4 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 6 3 - 2
2=3
relation when it was plotted as a function of e0 . Simi-
larly in the case of potato, a relationship between loss
modulus and porosity was observed (Scanlon, Day, &
Povey, 1998). In case of extruded starch, porosity is
highly correlated with shear strength or other mechan-
ical properties (Bhatnagar & Hanna, 1997; Hutchinson,
Siodlak, & Smith, 1987; Gogoi, Alavi, & Rizvi, 2000).
Porosity and crispiness of snack foods by extrusion or
frying are highly related. Porosity plays the most im-
portant role for agglomerate strength of dried foods.
The lower the porosity or in other words, the higher the
apparent density of the agglomerate, the stronger the
agglomerate. In addition to porosity, adhesion or
binding forces of particles in the matrix (i.e. structure)
also a€ects its mechanical strength (Pietsch, 1999). The
variation in porosity, average pore size and pore size
distribution has signi®cant e€ects on the textural char-
acteristics of the dried foods (Huang & Clayton, 1990).
Thus it is important to predict the formation of pores in
foods during drying due to its importance in quality
characterization and process design.
The process of pore formation during drying is very
complex. In most cases, porosity is predicted by empir-
ical correlations as a function of water content. Exam-
Palipane, Driscoll, & Srzednicki, 1992), quadratic (Pal-
ipane et al., 1992; Senadeera, Bhandari, Young, & Wi-
jesinghe, 1998; McMinn & Magee, 1998; Rahman,
240 M.A. Hussain et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248
Notation
F product category
ke e€ective thermal conductivity (W/m K)
ke0 e€ective thermal conductivity before drying
(W/m K)
MSE mean square error
MPE absolute mean percent error
N number of optimum node
n number of data point
T temperature of drying (°C)
Perera, Chen, Driscoll, & Potluri, 1996; Rapusas &
Driscoll, 1995), exponential forms (Mattea, Urbicain,
& Rotstein, 1986), and power-law equation (Pietsch &
Calvelo, 1984; Wildegger-Gaissmaier & Agarwal, 1990).
The drawbacks of these correlations are: (i) this does not
provide the physics of the process, (ii) the parameters do
not have any physical meaning, and (iii) this is only
limited to the speci®c products and experimental con-
ditions used (Rahman, 2001). Literature sources are
limited to the empirical correlations due to the com-
plexity of the pore formation process. No attempt has
been made to develop a generic model as identi®ed by
the authors. The best way of developing a model is to
use fundamental knowledge if possible. Our funda-
mental understanding of the underlying scienti®c prin-
ciples that govern the formation of pores is minimal. In
a ®rst attempt, Rahman (2000) identi®ed the four ge-
neric trends of pore formation in foods during drying.
The formation of pores in foods during drying can be
grouped into two generic types: one with an inversion
point and another without an inversion point (Figs. 1
and 2) (Rahman, 2000). These generic trends are pro-
posed based on the experimental evidence published in
the literature. Fig. 1(A) shows that initially pores are
collapsed and reached at a critical value, and further
decrease of water content during drying causes the for-
mation of pores until completely dried. Opposite con-
ditions exist in Fig. 1(B). Fig. 2 shows that pores are
increased or decreased as a function of water content
(Rahman, 2000). The glass transition theory is one of
the proposed concepts to explain the process of
Fig. 1. Change of porosity as a function of water content (with an
inversion point) (Rahman, 2000).
TS transfer function
Xw moisture content (mass fraction, wet basis)
Xw0 initial moisture content before drying (mass fraction, wet
basis)
e experimental porosity of dried sample at di€erent moisture
contents
em porosity of dried sample from model at di€erent moisture
contents
e0 initial porosity before drying
er porosity predicted from polynomial regression
d residual …e er †
shrinkage and collapse during drying. However the glass
transition theory does not hold true for all products.
Other concepts, such as surface tension, structure, en-
vironment pressure, and mechanisms of moisture
transport also play important roles in explaining the
formation of pores (Rahman, 2001). Recently Rahman
(2001) proposed a hypothesis that capillary force is the
main force responsible for collapse and that counter-
balancing this force causes the formation of pores and
reduced shrinkage. As the process of pore formation
mechanism is very complex, arti®cial neural network
can be utilized as a powerful tool for modeling. Their
most important attribute is that they are capable of
learning or adapting to various nonlinear and complex
data set such as pore formation. The ®rst arti®cial
neuron model was presented by MuCulloch and Pitts
(1943) and later it has been extended by others (Ru-
melhart & McClelland, 1986).
Arti®cial neural networks are emerging as a promis-
ing tool in process identi®cation and controls owing to
their ability to model process with accuracy (Hussain &
Rahman, 1999; Hussain & Kershenbaum, 2000). They
also o€er a cost-e€ective method of developing useful
relationships between variables, when the experimental
data of these variables are available. Neural networks
are universal function approximators that typically
work much better in practical applications than more
traditional (polynomial) function approximations
method. A typical `neuron' takes in a set of inputs, sums
them together, takes some function of them, and passes
the output through a weighted connection to another
Fig. 2. Change of porosity as a function of water content (no inversion
point) (Rahman, 2000).
 M.A. Hussain et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248
neuron. The neuron is thus just a predictor variable, or a
function of a nonlinear combination of predictor vari-
ables. The connection weights serve as adjustable pa-
rameters, which are set by a `training method', that is,
they are estimated from part of the data. Numbers of
applications have been done in the area of food prop-
erties prediction. Examples are in the prediction of
fruit ripening (Morimoto, Purwanto, Suzuki, Aono, &
Hashimoto, 1997), inactivation kinetics (Geeraerd,
Versyck, & Van Impe, 1998), viscosity (Bouchard &
Grandjean, 1995), smell by electronic nose (Payne,
1998), food quality (Ni & Gunasekaran, 1998), loaf
volume during baking (Horimoto, Durance, Nakai, &
Lukow, 1995), sensory perception (Bomio, 1998), clas-
si®cation of nut (Casasent, Sipe, Schatzki, Keagy, &
Lee, 1998), and thermal conductivity (Hussain & Rah-
man, 1999).
In science and engineering always there is a tendency
to generalize a process or prediction. In the literature
there are a number of attempts that has been made to
develop generic models in predicting food properties.
For example, Rahman (1992) plotted thermal conduc-
tivity as a function of moisture for di€erent foods and
found varied curvatures. However, when ke =‰ke0 …1 e†Š is
plotted against Xw =Xw0 , all points for di€erent foods
condensed into one line and the correlation can be
considered generalized model for the prediction of
thermal conductivity as a function of moisture and po-
rosity. Later Rahman, Chen, and Perera (1997) devel-
oped a generic model to predict the thermal conductivity
of fruit and vegetable as a function of temperature,
moisture content, and porosity. Rahman (1994) also
developed a generic prediction model to estimate the
freezing point of meat.
In this paper, neural network is utilized in two ways
to model the pores formation during air drying. First, it
is used to predict porosity after drying of various fruits
and vegetables such as potato, starch, apple, lentil,
carrot, pear, garlic, calamari, celery, onion and squid
from various combinations of inputs such as the initial
porosity, temperature, water content and identifying the
types of food. In the other approach, the neural network
in hybrid fashion with a polynomial regression model
was utilized to predict the porosity with the same com-
bination of inputs as used earlier.
2. Model development
2.1. Arti®cial neural networks
2.1.1. Overview
Neural networks have the ability to resemble (to
certain extent) human characteristic of problem solving
that are dicult to simulate using the logical, analytical
techniques of expert system and standard software
241
technologies. Neural network is essentially an inter-
connected assembly of simple processing elements, units
or nodes, whose functionality is loosely based on the
human's neuron. The processing ability of the network
is stored in the inter-unit connection strengths, or
weights. The values of the weights are obtained by a
process of training or learning from a set of training
pattern (input±output relations). These weights are
adapted by one or the other learning rule and represent
the long-term memory of the neural network.
Numerous types of the arti®cial neural network exist
such as multi-layer perceptron (MLP), radial basis
function (RBF) networks and recurrent neural networks
(RNN), but each type consists of the same basic fea-
tures: nodes, layers and connection. The smallest ele-
ment of a network is the node. Every node receives
signal from connection, or link. The signal is then
summed together before being applied to transfer
function to produce the output. The output signals are
then propagated to other nodes until it reaches the
output of the network. The type of network used in this
work is the multi-layered networks, which are described
in detail next.
2.2. Multi-layer perceptron networks
Multi-layer perceptron networks are one of the most
popular and successful neural network architectures,
which are suited to a wide range of applications such as
prediction and process modeling. An MPL network
comprises a number of identical units organized in lay-
ers, with those on one layer connected to those on the
next layer so that the outputs of one layer are feed-
forward as inputs to the next layer. Note that the output
of the nodes is only to pass nodes in one direction and
not reversed. Fig. 3 illustrates the topology of an ex-
tremely simple, fully connected three-layer MPL net-
work. MPL neural networks are normally trained using
a supervised training algorithm, which are mentioned
later.
Di€erent types of activation functions can be utilized
for the network, however the common ones, which are
Fig. 3. Fully connected three-layered MLP network for standard
neural network.
242 M.A. Hussain et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248

sucient for most applications, are the sigmoidal and
hyperbolic tangent functions. The hidden layers as well
as the number of neurons in each layer may vary from
one to any ®nite number depending on the user speci-
®cation. It is this hidden layer structure which essentially
de®nes the topology of the feedforward arti®cial neural
network (FANN). The topology of the network, to-
gether with the neuron processing function and massive
interconnection, imparts to the FANN its powerful,
robust signal processing and pattern recognition capa-
bilities. Although some preliminary results are available
for predicting the optimal number of nonlinear hidden
neurons, no general and mature techniques exist, which
determine the most appropriate topology for any spe-
ci®c application. The structure and topology are at
present still determined from past experience and by
trial-and-error method.
It is generally accepted that the performance of a
well-designed MLP neural network is comparable with,
but generally no better than obtained using good clas-
sical statistical techniques. MLP networks score over
classical techniques in their much reduced development
time, their ability to adapt to changing situations, and
their ability to make use of related information. How-
ever, for problems, which have already been much
studied by statisticians, a dramatic increase in perfor-
mance is unlikely to be achieved by using an MLP. A
combination of both methods in hybrid fashion would
be highly advantageous in itself and is one reason for its
use in our studies.
The partial known model (the regression model) pro-
vides a better starting point than standard neural net-
work and at the same time, the neural network allows
for both structural and parametric uncertainty. The
general structure of the hybrid neural network and its
training scheme can be seen in Figs. 4 and 5, respec-
tively.
2.4. Neural network training
Normally, the backpropagation method is the ®rst-
order gradient method used to train neural networks to
correlate between input and output variables. It has,
however few drawbacks. First the rate of convergence is
extremely slow and the improvement per iteration falls
sharply with increasing iteration. Secondly, without
modi®cation such as the addition of the momentum
term, it can often lead to local minima in its optimiza-
tion process. Other second-order-based optimization
techniques such as the conjugate gradient, Levenberg±
Marquardt method and Newton's method have been
found to have better convergence properties, although
at the expense of computational complexity (Hagan &
Menhaj, 1994). Many di€erent ways of improving the
learning rate can also be found in the literature (Ed-
wards & Goh, 1995). Other variants of this algorithm

2.3. Hybrid neural network

Neural network modeling is essentially black box in

nature. No prior knowledge about the process is re-
quired and any existing prior knowledge is ignored. The
ability of neural network to learn non-parametric or
structure-free approximation is its strength, but this is
also its weakness. Typical neural networks have many
Fig. 4. Fully connected three-layered MLP network for hybrid neural
internal parameters (the weight and biases) and these network.
could lead to over-®tting of noise as well as the under-
lying function. This results in poor generalization. These
weaknesses of neural network have encouraged recent
research to focus on combining neural network with
other component, such as ®rst principle model, fuzzy
logic and Kalman ®ltering. In this paper, a hybrid neural
network was developed, which combined a regression
polynomial-based model from given data with a non-
linear neural network (Dimitris & Lyle, 1992; Michaet &
Mark, 1994; Thompson & Kremer, 1992).
The neural network in the hybrid architecture is re-
sponsible in learning the di€erence between the default
model and the target data. Although the neural network
is a semi-parametric estimator, it has the capability of
approximating this di€erence. So, the hybrid model has
internal structures, each part performing a di€erent task. Fig. 5. Training of hybrid neural network for porosity prediction.
 M.A. Hussain et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248
and di€erent methods of weight training such as
chemotaxis method are also available (Morris, Monta-
gue, & Willis, 1994). Techniques to improve the e-
ciency of networks by weight pruning have also been
developed. In this work, Levenberg±Marquardt method
is chosen to improve the speed of convergence, during
training of the network.
2.5. Case study: porosity prediction
2.5.1. Neural network modeling strategies
In building the multi-layered feed forward neural
network model, the crucial step is to derive the appro-
priate con®guration so that by supplying it with the
relevant inputs, it can give an unambiguous and precise
prediction of the porosity of the foodstu€ concerned.
There was a total of 286 data collected for this modeling
process. The data were separated into two sets with 143
in each of them. During the network training, the two
sets of data were switched between one and the other to
avoid over-learning. The data for temperature, water
content and initial porosity were scaled to values be-
tween 0.1 and 0.9 to facilitate the training of the net-
work. Training was done by switching between these
two data sets until the mean square error (MSE)
achieved for both sets in training was less than a mini-
mum value that was set di€erently for the di€erent
number of inputs. The number of training cycles needed
to achieve this error was normally about 50 epochs.
Note that the MSE value is de®ned as the average of the
square of the di€erences between the actual output (i.e.,
experimental values) and the neural network output
(i.e., predicted). This is the normal error criterion used
during training (optimising) of the neural network to ®t
the data given.
The above method of training the neural network
using two databases ensures that it could give a good
generalized prediction of the porosity from knowing any
input data supplied to it and not based on the training
database only. The optimum con®guration of the neural
network, i.e. the number of hidden nodes (with the input
and output nodes already predetermined by the dat-
abase size) was decided after trial and error based on the
minimum MSE achieved during the training process.
The same approach in the modelling process is followed
when dealing with the hybrid method of combining
neural network with the regression model.
Three types of transfer functions for training the
network were used in this study. The activation func-
tions are the purelin, tansig and logsig. Purelin is a linear
transfer function. Neurons of this type are used as linear
approximators. It is usually used in the output layer.
Logsig is one of the sigmoid transfer functions that takes
input value between plus and minus in®nity and then
provides the output into the range 0±1. This transfer
function is commonly used in backpropagation net-
243
works, in part, because it is di€erentiable. Tansig utilizes
a hyperbolic tangent transfer function with values from
)1 to +1. Both the Tansig and logsig activation func-
tions are utilized in the hidden layers only.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Di€erent inputs and modeling methods
There are four variables considered as the inputs for
the modeling process. These variables are temperature
(T), water content …Xw †, initial porosity …e0 † and the type
of product (F). Two approaches were used in this study.
Standard Neural network (SNN) and hybrid neural
network (HNN) were used in the modeling of the pro-
cess. In this work, ®rst both temperature and water
content were considered as inputs, and then initial po-
rosity was added as second combination and ®nally a
combination of all four variables mentioned above was
utilized, as detailed in the various parts below. The
porosity data during air drying of apple, potato, starch,
lentil, carrot, pear, sweet potato, garlic, calamari, squid,
celery, onion were used in our studies. The porosity used
here is the apparent porosity of the material. More de-
tailed terminology of porosity is given by Rahman
(1995). The air drying temperature, moisture content,
initial porosity were varied from 5±70°C, 0±0.94, and
0±0.9, respectively.
3.1.1. Part I ± temperature and water content as the two
inputs
In this part, the temperature and water content,
which are considered as two important variables, were
chosen as the inputs for the modeling process. Initially a
polynomial-based regression model that relates the po-
rosity with T and Xw was developed which is necessary
for the hybrid model. From least-squares based regres-
sion method, the best polynomial- based model is given
as below
er ˆ 0:5Xw2 0:8Xw 0:0002T 2 ‡ 0:02T 0:15: …1†
The predicted porosity values from the regression model
(Eq. (1)) leave some residual values. It is clearly shown
in Fig. 6. The residuals from the actual porosity values
are given by
dˆe er : …2†
The estimation of error enables us to use neural network
to map the presence of these residuals in a hybrid ge-
neric model strategy, as has been discussed previously.
However modeling the porosity data by only using
standard neural networks is also done as comparison
studies. During modeling with the neural networks, the
inputs for the hybrid neural network were the same as
the standard neural network i.e. temperature (T) and
244 M.A. Hussain et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248
Fig. 6. Regression model with two inputs (T and Xw ).
water content (Xw ). The supervised training method used
requires target values. The target values for the two
types of network i.e. standard and hybrid are di€erent,
as can be seen from Figs. 3±5, respectively. For the
standard neural network, the target value is the experi-
mental porosity (e), but for the neural network in the
hybrid scheme, the target value is the residual porosity
(d). The method of training these networks in terms of
switching from one data set to another was the same.
The results of these modelling using the SNN and HNN
are shown in Figs. 7 and 8, respectively, and are dis-
cussed in detail in the next section.
3.1.2. Part II ± temperature, water content and initial
porosity as the three inputs
To improve the network training, the initial porosity
was added as another extra input in the model. The
polynomial based model obtained in this case is
er ˆ 0:5Xw2 0:8Xw 0:002T 2 ‡ 0:02T 0:15…1
The values of porosity from Eq. (3) were once again
compared to the actual value and shown in Fig. 9. As
Fig. 7. Result for standard neural network with two inputs (T and Xw ).
Fig. 8. Result for hybrid neural network with two inputs (T and Xw ).
the polynomial-based model has been modi®ed, the re-
siduals of the ®nal porosity have to be recalculated using
Eq. (2). In this part, the inputs for training the model
were T ; Xw and e0 while the target value for the standard
neural network is the experimental porosity (e) and the
target value for hybrid neural network is the porosity
residuals (d). The method of training these networks is
the same as in Part I. The results of their modeling can
be seen in Figs. 10 and 11, respectively, and the dis-
cussion will be seen in the next section.
3.1.3. Part III ± temperature, water content, initial
porosity and type of product as inputs
The various data collected from the individual ex-
periments originate from di€erent types of products. To
investigate whether the type of product can in¯uence the
value of porosity, this input was added together with the
three other inputs as in the previous trial. As the type of
product is not in numerical form, the products were
e0 †: assigned with numerical values. A number was given to
each type of product for example: apple, carrot and pear
…3†
(sugar-based products) are represented by number `1',
potato, starch and onion (starch-based product) by
number `2' and lentil, garlic, calamari and celery (other
Fig. 9. Regression model with three inputs (T ; Xw and e0 ).
 M.A. Hussain et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248 245

Fig. 10. Result for standard neural network with three inputs (T ; Xw Fig. 12. Regression model with four inputs (T ; Xw ; e0 and F).
and e0 ).

Fig. 13. Result for standard neural network with four inputs
Fig. 11. Result for hybrid neural network with three inputs (T ; Xw and (T ; Xw ; e0 and F).
e0 ).

products) by number `3'. To relate the type of product

into the model of the system, the following regression
equation is obtained:
er ˆ 0:5Xw2 0:8Xw 0:002T 2 ‡ 0:02T 0:05…1 e0 †F ;
…4†
where F is a numerical value given to the type of product
used. The residuals resulted are shown in Fig. 12. A
small improvement was found as compared to the ®rst
two regression models. By using this regression model,
value of the residual porosity (d) is recalculated again
from Eq. (2). Then the standard neural network and
hybrid neural network were trained by the same way
mention in Parts I and II but with di€erent inputs to the Fig. 14. Result for neural network with four inputs (T ; Xw ; e0 and F).
network i.e. T ; Xw ; e0 and F. The results of these
modelling using the SNN and HNN can be seen in Figs.
13 and 14, respectively. Figs. 6±14 visually indicate the It was found that di€erent combinations of the in-
variation of experimental data set and predicted values puts, number of nodes and the activation functions gave
from the models, thus provide visual presentation of di€erent results to the modelling process using the
accuracy. These ®gures also show the complexity of neural network methodology. The value of MSE and
experimental data set of pore formation during drying. absolute mean percentage error (MPE) were used to
246 M.A. Hussain et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248

Table 1
Prediction accuracy of the models developed from the data set
Modela Nb TSc MSEd MPEe; f
Hidden layer Output layer
2
Regression model I (2) ± ± ± 3:19  10 33.57 (4.11)
2
Standard neural network (2) 12 Tansig Logsig 1:00  10 75.70 (2.55)
3
Hybrid neural network (2) 12 Logsig Tansig 9:80  10 56.50 (2.01)
2
Regression model II (3) ± ± ± 2:64  10 23.69 (4.13)
4
Standard neural network (3) 15 Logsig Tansig 7:44  10 6.52 (0.67)
4
Hybrid neural network (3) 15 Logsin Logsig 4:07  10 0.98 (0.55)
2
Regression model III (4) ± ± ± 2:34  10 14.15 (4.21)
4
Standard neural network (4) 13 Logsig Logsig 4:52  10 6.42 (0.34)
4
Hybrid neural network (4) 13 Logsig Tansig 2:68  10 0.58 (0.39)
a
Number in parentheses indicates the number of input.
b
Number of optimum nodes.
c
Transfer function.
P
d
Mean square errorˆ …1=n† ‰…e em †2 Š.
e P
Absolute mean percent errorˆ …1=n† ‰100  …je em j†Š=e; em ˆ porosity of dried sample at di€erent moisture contents from model.
f
Values in parentheses indicate the standard deviation.

compare the capability of each type of network as well
as for the regression model. The MSE and MPE were
calculated as:
1X n
MSE ˆ …e em †2 ;
n iˆ1
1X n
j…e em †j
MPE ˆ  100:
n iˆ1 e
Table 1 shows the MSE and MPE for the training data
with all protocols as well as the standard deviation for
the mean error in the brackets. The number of nodes
required and the transfer function used were also in-
cluded in Table 1. In case of two inputs (temperature
and moisture content) the MPE errors for standard
neural network and hybrid neural network were 75.7%
and 56.5%, respectively. The hybrid neural network
models are far better than the standard neural network
models (Table 1). However, the overall result was still
poor for either SNN or HNN and not any better than
the regression model. The outputs from the network
could not map to the actual values of the porosity; thus
using only the two inputs, temperature and water con-
tent was not enough to create a generic model for esti-
mating the porosity of these food materials.
In the case of three inputs (temperature, moisture
content, and initial porosity) the prediction accuracy
increased from 75.7% to 6.5% in case of the standard
neural network models while utilizing the hybrid neural
network models increased the accuracy further from
56.5 % to 0.98 %. Both these results were far better than
the results of the regression model only, i.e. 23.7% but
with the hybrid neural network model giving the best
results. This indicated that initial porosity is one of the
important parameters to be considered for developing a
generic model.
In the case of four inputs with the addition of product
type the prediction accuracy for the neural network
hybrid model improved further from 0.98% to 0.58%
(Table 1). This was also far better than utilizing the
standard neural network model or the regression model.
As discussed earlier the classes of product types con-
sidered are sugar-, starch-based, and other product
category. The prediction from the neural network
models with four inputs is far better than the two inputs
and slightly better than the three inputs. The additional
inputs (the type of product) improve the performance of
neural network models signi®cantly. The further ad-
vantages of using four inputs were that it needed fewer
nodes than the three inputs case and gave more accurate
simulation results. The grouping of the product type is
not an easy task, but here an innovative attempt was
made in the modeling based on grouping the products.
A well-de®ned class of products could be done when
more data are available in the literature. The purpose of
classi®cation was only to show that including product
type (i.e., e€ect of other components) could also help in
developing the generic model and improving the accu-
racy in predicting the porosity of these food materials.
4. Conclusion
In this work, three di€erent cases involving di€erent
combinations of inputs to estimate the porosity by
neural network modeling were studied. The ®rst involves
two inputs, which are the temperature and water con-
tent. From the results obtained, it was found that these
two inputs for the models are not enough to produce
satisfactory prediction accuracy. When one more input
(initial porosity, e0 ) was added to the network, the pre-
diction error was improved dramatically from 56.5% to
0.98% for the MPE result of hybrid neural network.
 M.A. Hussain et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 51 (2002) 239±248
When four inputs as temperature, water content, initial
porosity, and the type of product were used in the net-
work modeling, the best performance was achieved with
prediction accuracy of 0.58%. It can be concluded that
temperature, water content, initial porosity and the type
of product are important parameters to be considered in
obtaining the best generic model for the estimation of
porosity. The hybrid models that consist of the poly-
nomial-based model plus the neural network model are
also more accurate than using the standard neural net-
work or the regression model alone in predicting the
porosity of various foods during air drying. The hybrid
neural network is well supplemented by the polynomial-
based model in modeling, which helps to obtain an ac-
curate generic model.
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