Simultaneous Classification of Teas According to Their Varieties and Geographical Origins by Using NIR Spectroscopy and SPA-LDA

Due to the human health benefits already scientifically proven, tea (Camellia sinensis) has been widely studied in the literature. Several studies report the classification of the variety or geographical origin of teas, separately. Thus, this paper has proposed a methodology for simultaneous classification of tea samples according to their varieties (green or black) and geographical origins (Brazil, Argentina, or Sri Lanka). For this purpose, near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and three differing supervised pattern recognition techniques, namely SIMCA (soft independent modeling of class analogy), PLS-DA (partial least squares-discriminant analysis), and SPA-LDA (successive projections algorithm associated with linear discriminant analysis) have been used. Despite having good results, both full-spectrum PLS-DA and SIMCA were not able to achieve 100 % classification accuracy, regardless of the significance level for the F test in the case of the SIMCA model. On the other hand, the resulting SPA-LDA model successfully classified all studied samples into five differing tea classes (Argentinean green tea; Brazilian green tea; Argentinean black tea; Brazilian black tea; and Sri Lankan black tea) using 12 wave numbers alone.