Determination of the Geographical Origin of Hazelnuts (Corylus avellana L.) by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIR) and a Low-Level Fusion with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)

Fourier-transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy was used to determine the geographical origin of 233 hazelnut samples of various varieties from five different countries (Germany, France, Georgia, Italy, Turkey). The experimental determination of the geographical origin of hazelnuts is important, because there are usually large price differences between the producer countries and thus a risk of food fraud that should not be underestimated. The present work is a feasibility study using a low-cost method, as high-field NMR and UPLC-QTOF-MS have already been used for this question. Sample sets were split with repeated nested cross validation and an ensemble of discriminant classifiers with random subspaces was used to build the classification models. By using a preprocessing strategy consisting of multiplicative scatter correction, bucketing and the mean averaging of five measured spectra per sample, a test accuracy of 90.6 ± 3.9% was achieved, which rivals results obtained with much more expensive infrastructure. The application of the feature selection approach surrogate minimal depth showed that the successful classification is mainly caused by protein signals. In addition, a low-level data fusion of the NIR and NMR data was performed to assess how well the two methods complement each other. The data fusion was compared to a complementary approach, where the classification results based on the individual NIR and NMR models were jointly examined. The data fusion performed better than the individual methods with a test accuracy of 96.6 ± 2.8%. A comparison of the outliers in all classification models shows conspicuities in always the same samples, indicating that robust classification models are obtained.