Abstract: Context: We work on Laser-induced breadkdown spectroscopy. This spectroscopic technique captures the light emitted by the plasma generated by by a laser pulse that ablates a small amount of material. The information in each spectrum is the chemical composition of the ablated material at an atomic level, through the emission lines at specific wavelenghts of each atomic specie.There should be also some molecular information as some molecules are recombined again when the plasma get cooler and they could emit also some light. We wonder if this technique could offer information about the geographic origin of the potatoes, its variety, or some other interesting information such as the amount of starch, which seems to be related to the suitability of a particular variety of potatoe as a french fried potatoe.
The measurements (about two hundred spectra) are repeated in 10 different slices of fresh potatoes. We have some information of origin and variety of some of the potatoes.
Each spectrum is a set of 15211 "features", which are actually the measured wavelenghts, from about 180nm (ultraviolet) to 900nm (near infrarred). For each feature, we obtain an intensity measurement (from 0 up to 65535 arbitrary units).
The spectra have been preprocessed to substract the instrumental noise (dark noise of the spectrometer) and saturated spectra (at least one wavelength with the value of 65535) have been removed.
