Evaluation of Statistical Treatment of Left-Censored Contamination Data: Example Involving Deoxynivalenol Occurrence in Pasta and Pasta Substitute Products

The handling of data on food contamination frequently represents a challenge because these are often left-censored, being composed of both positive and non-detected values. The latter observations are not quantified and provide only the information that they are below a laboratory-specific threshold value. Besides deterministic approaches, which simplify the treatment through the substitution of non-detected values with fixed threshold or null values, a growing interest has been shown in the application of stochastic approaches to the treatment of unquantified values. In this study, a multiple imputation procedure was applied in order to analyze contamination data on deoxynivalenol, a mycotoxin that may be present in pasta and pasta substitute products. An application of the proposed technique to censored deoxynivalenol occurrence data is presented. The results were compared to those attained using deterministic techniques (substitution methods). In this context, the stochastic approach seemed to provide a more accurate, unbiased and realistic solution to the problem of left-censored occurrence data. The complete sample of values could then be used to estimate the exposure of the general population to deoxynivalenol based on consumption data.