Pattern recognition of Chinese flue-cured tobaccos by an improved and simplified K-nearest neighbors classification algorithm on near infrared spectra

In tobacco industry of China, tobacco leaves are classified and managed in terms of their cultivation areas and plant parts of tobacco-stalks. However, sometimes intentionally or involuntary mislabeling cultivation areas, blending tobacco plant parts would occur into tobacco market. The error will affect the style and quality of cigarettes. In the present work, more than 1000 Chinese flue-cured tobacco leaf samples, which have 12 genotypes and cultivated from 5 to 10 regions of China in 2003 and 2004, have been discriminated by means of an improved and simplified KNN classification algorithm (IS-KNN) based on near infrared (NIR) spectra. An original method of optimizing number of significant principal components (PCs) based on analysis of error and cross-validation was advanced. Compared with conventional pattern recognition methods KNN, NN, LDA and PLS-DA, IS-KNN exhibits good adaptability in discrimination of complicated Chinese flue-cured tobaccos. The practice in this work shows that optimized number of PCs and performance of classification models are closely relative to complicated extent of samples but not to number of categories or samples. The results demonstrated the usefulness of NIR spectra combined with chemometrics as an objective and rapid method for the authentication and identification of tobacco leaves or other kinds of powder samples.