Millets have garnered less attention as compared to other
grains
despite being versatile and highly nutritious crops due to the poor
shelf life of millet-based products such as millet flour. The shelf
life constraints stem from significant concerns about the rancidity
and degradation of nutritional value in millet products over time.
Conventionally, the shelf life of millet-based products has been estimated
through experimental analysis of rancidity indicators. Prediction
of shelf life of food and beverages has been facilitated by the advancements
in artificial intelligence and computational learning techniques.
This study employs a long short-term memory (LSTM) network architecture
model to predict shelf life based on nutritional and rancidity indicators.
The performance of the LSTM network was compared with the feed forward
neural network for six different types of pearl millet variants. The
LSTM network demonstrated better performance with R
2 > 0.96 for all of the predicted variables. Additionally,
the study found that the nutritional value limits the shelf life of
low-rancidity variants to 14–16 days, while high-rancidity
variants have a shorter shelf life of 4–7 days due to higher
rancidity.