Wine authenticity verification as a forensic problem: an application of likelihood ratio test to label verification.

The aim of the study was to investigate the applicability of the likelihood ratio (LR) approach for verifying the authenticity of 178 samples of 3 Italian wine brands: Barolo, Barbera, and Grignolino described by 27 parameters describing their chemical compositions. Since the problem of products authenticity may be of forensic interest, the likelihood ratio approach, expressing the role of the forensic expert, was proposed for determining the true origin of wines. It allows us to analyse the evidence in the context of two hypotheses, that the object belongs to one or another wine brand. Various LR models were the subject of the research and their accuracy was evaluated by the Empirical cross entropy (ECE) approach. The rates of correct classifications for the proposed models were higher than 90% and their performance evaluated by ECE was satisfactory.