Drift correction is an important concern in Electronic noses (E-nose) for maintaining stable performance during continuous work. A large number of reports have been presented for dealing with E-nose drift through machine-learning approaches in the laboratory. In this study, we aim to counter the drift effect in more challenging situations in which the category information (labels) of the drifted samples is difficult or expensive to obtain. Thus, only a few of the drifted samples can be used for label querying. To solve this problem, we propose an innovative methodology based on Active Learning (AL) that selectively provides sample labels for drift correction. Moreover, we utilize a dynamic clustering process to balance the sample category for label querying. In the experimental section, we set up two E-nose drift scenarios-a long-term and a short-term scenario-to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology. The results indicate that the proposed methodology is superior to the other state-of-art methods presented. Furthermore, the increasing tendencies of parameter sensitivity and accuracy are analyzed. In addition, the Label Efficiency Index (LEI) is adopted to measure the efficiency and labelling cost of the AL methods. The LEI values indicate that our proposed methodology exhibited better performance than the other presented AL methods in the online drift correction of E-noses.
Keywords: active learning; drift counteraction; dynamic clustering; electronic nose.