Abstract. The correct assessment of meat quality (i.e., to fulfill the consumer’s needs) is
crucial element within the meat industry. Although there are several factors that affect the
perception of taste, tenderness is considered the most important characteristic. In this paper,
a Feature Selection procedure, based on a Sensitivity Analysis, is combined with a Support
Vector Machine, in order to predict lamb meat tenderness. This real-world problem is defined
in terms of two difficult regression tasks, by modeling objective (e.g. Warner–Bratzler Shear
force) and subjective (e.g. human taste panel) measurements. In both cases, the proposed
solution is competitive when comp