Discrimination between authentic and adulterated liquors by near-infrared spectroscopy and ensemble classification.

Chinese liquor is one of the famous distilled spirits and counterfeit liquor is becoming a serious problem in the market. Especially, age liquor is facing the crisis of confidence because it is difficult for consumer to identify the marked age, which prompts unscrupulous traders to pose off low-grade liquors as high-grade liquors. An ideal method for authenticity confirmation of liquors should be non-invasive, non-destructive and timely. The combination of near-infrared spectroscopy with chemometrics proves to be a good way to reach these premises. A new strategy is proposed for classification and verification of the adulteration of liquors by using NIR spectroscopy and chemometric classification, i.e., ensemble support vector machines (SVM). Three measures, i.e., accuracy, sensitivity and specificity were used for performance evaluation. The results confirmed that the strategy can serve as a screening tool applied to verify adulteration of the liquor, that is, a prior step used to condition the sample to a deeper analysis only when a positive result for adulteration is obtained by the proposed methodology.