We discuss the modeling of temporal dominance of sensations (TDS) data, time series data appearing in sensory analysis, that describe temporal changes of the dominant taste in the oral cavity. Our aims were to obtain the transition process of attributes (tastes and mouthfeels) in the oral cavity, to express the tendency of dominance durations of attributes, and to specify factors (such as sex, age, food preference, dietary habits, and sensitivity to a particular taste) affecting dominance durations, simultaneously. To achieve these aims, we propose an analysis procedure applying models based on the semi-Markov chain and the negative binomial regression, one of the generalized linear models. By using our method, we can take differences among individual panelists and dominant attributes into account. We analyzed TDS data for milk chocolate with the proposed method and verified the performance of our model compared with conventional analysis methods. We found that our proposed model outperformed conventional ones; moreover, we identified factors that have effects on dominance durations. Results of an experiment support the importance of reflecting characteristics of panelists and attributes.

The article ''Statistical modeling for temporal dominance of sensations data incorporating individual characteristics of panelists: an application to data of milk chocolate'', written by Sumito Kurata, Reiko Kuroda and Fumiyasu Komaki was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal on 24 th September, 2021 without open access. With the author(s)' decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 4 th October,2021 to Ó The Author(s) 2021 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the