{"title":"Classification and Prediction of Food Safety Policy Tools in China Based on Machine Learning","authors":"Di Sha , Pei Du , Linhai Wu","doi":"10.1016/j.jfp.2024.100276","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Governments use policy interventions to mitigate food safety risks. Despite its crucial role, empirical studies evaluating the effectiveness of China's food safety policy tools are scarce. Drawing on a dataset encompassing 11,236 food safety policy texts from 2005 to 2021 and the incidence of problematic food products in the Eastern, Central, and Western regions of China, this study employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models to facilitate the classification of policy tools and forecast the effectiveness of policy combinations. The study reveals that (1) local governments have gradually become an important supplementary maker of food safety policies, and have issued an increasing number of policy tools year by year. (2) Mandatory policy tools are predominant in number and have the highest legal hierarchy and authority levels, followed successively by guiding policy and voluntary policy tools. (3) Mandatory policy tools demonstrated the most effective intervention results, followed successively by guiding policy and voluntary policy tools. (4) The forecast analysis reveals that combinations of policies within high-growth frameworks and those driven by mandatory regulations emerge as the most effective. Therefore, the balance of policy tools in terms of type, effectiveness, and quantity, as well as their applicability in different situations, should all be taken into account.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":15903,"journal":{"name":"Journal of food protection","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X24000607/pdfft?md5=423483681d4cea9db95144d49c6dfac7&pid=1-s2.0-S0362028X24000607-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of food protection","FirstCategoryId":"97","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X24000607","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"农林科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"BIOTECHNOLOGY & APPLIED MICROBIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Governments use policy interventions to mitigate food safety risks. Despite its crucial role, empirical studies evaluating the effectiveness of China's food safety policy tools are scarce. Drawing on a dataset encompassing 11,236 food safety policy texts from 2005 to 2021 and the incidence of problematic food products in the Eastern, Central, and Western regions of China, this study employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models to facilitate the classification of policy tools and forecast the effectiveness of policy combinations. The study reveals that (1) local governments have gradually become an important supplementary maker of food safety policies, and have issued an increasing number of policy tools year by year. (2) Mandatory policy tools are predominant in number and have the highest legal hierarchy and authority levels, followed successively by guiding policy and voluntary policy tools. (3) Mandatory policy tools demonstrated the most effective intervention results, followed successively by guiding policy and voluntary policy tools. (4) The forecast analysis reveals that combinations of policies within high-growth frameworks and those driven by mandatory regulations emerge as the most effective. Therefore, the balance of policy tools in terms of type, effectiveness, and quantity, as well as their applicability in different situations, should all be taken into account.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Food Protection® (JFP) is an international, monthly scientific journal in the English language published by the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP). JFP publishes research and review articles on all aspects of food protection and safety. Major emphases of JFP are placed on studies dealing with:
Tracking, detecting (including traditional, molecular, and real-time), inactivating, and controlling food-related hazards, including microorganisms (including antibiotic resistance), microbial (mycotoxins, seafood toxins) and non-microbial toxins (heavy metals, pesticides, veterinary drug residues, migrants from food packaging, and processing contaminants), allergens and pests (insects, rodents) in human food, pet food and animal feed throughout the food chain;
Microbiological food quality and traditional/novel methods to assay microbiological food quality;
Prevention of food-related hazards and food spoilage through food preservatives and thermal/non-thermal processes, including process validation;
Food fermentations and food-related probiotics;
Safe food handling practices during pre-harvest, harvest, post-harvest, distribution and consumption, including food safety education for retailers, foodservice, and consumers;
Risk assessments for food-related hazards;
Economic impact of food-related hazards, foodborne illness, food loss, food spoilage, and adulterated foods;
Food fraud, food authentication, food defense, and foodborne disease outbreak investigations.