Hybrid Machine Learning-Assisted Raman Spectroscopy with Generative Feature Augmentation for Pharmaceutical Identification

Abstract

Rapid and reliable identification of pharmaceutical residues is important for safeguarding public health, ensuring food safety, and enabling practical Raman-based screening. In this study, we propose HyMLRaman, a hybrid Raman spectroscopy framework that combines deep spectral feature extraction, generative models, and classical machine-learning classifiers to identify six pharmaceutical compounds, including amoxicillin, chloramphenicol, ciprofloxacin, tetracycline, ibuprofen, and paracetamol. Raman spectra are converted into spectral images and encoded with several deep neural-network backbones, among which EfficientNet-B3 yields the most effective representation. The resulting 1536-dimensional embeddings are then used to train downstream classifiers, including SVM, KNN, logistic regression, random forest, XGBoost, and ANN, using stratified 10-fold cross-validation. The hybrid EfficientNet-B3--SVM configuration achieves the strongest baseline performance, reaching 96.31% accuracy and a macro-F1 score of 96.36%, outperforming the standalone CNN baseline. To address limited-data conditions, a generative model, a DDPM-based feature augmentation, is introduced in a PCA-reduced EfficientNet-B3 latent space. The low-data ablation results show that DDPM augmentation provides selective benefits, particularly for KNN with reduced training fractions, and that its effect remains classifier-dependent. Finally, an application-level Raman Pharmaceutical Analyzer demonstrates the feasibility of embedding the trained model into an interactive Raman analysis workflow. These results suggest that HyMLRaman provides a practical and interpretable route for rapid Raman-based pharmaceutical screening.