Angela Montanari - Böcker

This volume presents the latest advances in statistics and data science, including theoretical, methodological and computational developments and practical applications related to classification and clustering, data gathering, exploratory and multivariate data analysis, statistical modeling, and knowledge discovery and seeking.

The contributions gathered in this open access book focus on modern methods for data science and classification and present a series of real-world applications.

This Brief is concerned with the connection between food packaging and the chemical composition of packaging materials. In terms of the food packaging hygiene, the influence of the containers on the contained foods is discussed.

This edited volume on the latest advances in data science covers a wide range of topics in the context of data analysis and classification. In particular, it includes contributions on classification methods for high-dimensional data, clustering methods, multivariate statistical methods, and various applications. The book gathers a selection of peer-reviewed contributions presented at the Fifteenth Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS2015), which was hosted by the Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, from July 5 to 8, 2015.

This Brief describes the chemical features of canned food products and gives background information on the technology of canning foods. It explains how canned foods are different from other packaged foods, and illustrates and discusses their unique properties, including risks and failures. Canned foods are usually considered to offer a particularly long shelf-life and durability. An understanding of their properties and influences on their durability is therefore of great importance in the industrial production, and this Brief offers a compact introduction to this topic.The authors focus on thermally-preserved foods. They explain that the right choice of thermal treatment method (e.g. pasteurisation, sterilisation) as well as process parameters (e.g. time, temperature) is additionally influenced by criteria such as pH, water content, the presence and concentration of fatty molecules, of calcium, etc. So-called ‘survival curves’ can help in determining themethodology of choice, and the Brief introduces the reader to this concept. The authors also address defects and failures. They introduce selected indicators, which can help identifying failures of the entire food/packaging system, and demonstrate how image and visual analysis can be applied in quality controls. The explanations and industrial production of canned foods are exemplified with the case of canned tomato sauces and beans.