Origin identification of Panax notoginseng by multi-sensor information fusion strategy of infrared spectra combined with random forest.

Traditional Chinese medicine Panax notoginseng is a valuable geo-authentic herbal material. The difference of growth environment in different producing areas has significant influence on the quality of traditional Chinese medicine, and origin identification is an important part of the quality assessment of P. notoginseng. In this study, Fourier transform mid-infrared (FT-MIR) and near infrared (NIR) sensor technologies combined with single spectra analysis and multi-sensor information fusion strategy (low-, mid- and high-level) for the origin identification of 210 P. notoginseng samples from five cities in Yunnan Province, China. FT-MIR spectra were considered to play a greater role in data analysis than NIR spectra. Random forest (RF) was used to establish classification models. The result of the random forest Boruta (RF-Bo) model and the random forest variable selection (RF-Vs) model based on high-level multi-sensor information fusion strategy was satisfactory. In addition, the RF-Bo model based on high-level multi-sensor information fusion strategy was faster and simpler in data analysis and the accuracy was 95.6%.