Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Machine Learning for Accurate Dating of Historical Books

Non-destructive, fast, and accurate methods of dating are highly desirable for many heritage objects. Here, we present and critically evaluate the use of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopic data combined with three supervised machine learning methods to predict the publication year of paper books dated between 1851 and 2000. These methods provide different accuracies; however, we demonstrate that the underlying processes refer to common spectral features. Regardless of the machine learning method used, the most informative wavelength ranges can be associated with C–H and O–H stretching first overtone, typical of the cellulose structure, and N–H stretching first overtone from amide/protein structures. We find that the expected influence of degradation on the accuracy of prediction is not meaningful. The variance-bias decomposition of the reducible error reveals some differences among the three machine learning methods. Our results show that two out of the three methods allow predictions of publication dates in the period 1851–2000 from NIR spectroscopic data with an unprecedented accuracy of up to 2 years, better than any other non-destructive method applied to a real heritage collection.