Enhancing Confidence in Microplastic Spectral Identification via Conformal Prediction.

Microplastics are an emerging pollutant of concern, with environmental observations recorded across the world. Identifying the type of microplastic is challenging due to spectral similarities among the most common polymers, necessitating methods that can confidently distinguish plastic identities. In practice, a researcher chooses the reference vibrational spectrum that is most like the unknown spectrum, where the likeness between the two spectra is expressed numerically as the hit quality index (HQI).