Supervised pattern recognition to discriminate the geographical origin of rice bran oils: a first study

Supervised pattern recognition appears to be a useful tool to authenticate foodstuffs according to their geographical or varietal origin, when a set of samples whose classification is known a priori are available. In this work, linear discriminant analysis and artificial neural networks trained by the back-propagation algorithm have been used to discriminate rice bran oils manufactured in three different countries (Italy, Thailand and Switzerland) according to their geographical origin. The variables to be included in the mathematical models have been chosen by means of Fisher F-ratio value among the chemical indices routinely determined on vegetable oils (particularly fatty acids, triglycerides and sterol composition). The prediction ability of all the classifiers was 100% as evaluated by cross-validation. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.