Differentiation of Chinese robusta coffees according to species, using a combined electronic nose and tongue, with the aid of chemometrics

•Data from 2 instrumental techniques differentiated Chinese robusta coffee cultivars.•Chemometrics enabled correlations between analytical data and cultivar samples.•Combined use of an E-nose and an E-tongue improved the quality of the predictions.

Electronic nose and tongue sensors and chemometric multivariate analysis were applied to characterize and classify 7 Chinese robusta coffee cultivars with different roasting degrees. Analytical data were obtained from 126 samples of roasted coffee beans distributed in the Hainan Province of China. Physicochemical qualities, such as the pH, titratable acidity (TA), total soluble solids (TSS), total solids (TS), and TSS/TA ratio, were determined by wet chemistry methods. Data fusion strategies were investigated to improve the performance of models relative to the performance of a single technique. Clear classification of all the studied coffee samples was achieved by principal component analysis, K-nearest neighbour analysis, partial least squares discriminant analysis, and a back-propagation artificial neural network. Quantitative models were established between the sensor responses and the reference physicochemical qualities, using partial least squares regression (PLSR). The PLSR model with a fusion data set was considered the best model for determining the quality parameters.

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