In this study (purchase required) the authors propose and develop a strategy for a field-based screening test for crude honey adulteration (adulteration with inverted sugars) using Near InfraRed Spectroscopy (NIR) hand-held scanners. They developed a single class classification model that was sufficient to either give an “unadulterated” verdict or to refer the sample for confirmatory (IRMS) analysis.
The authors developed their SIMCA model using “genuine” adulterated honeys that had been previously seized in a Brazilian police operation that had cracked down on industrial-scale addition of invert sugar to honeys over a three year period, along with unadulterated honeys collected by police during the same operation. The traditional SIMCA was improved by optimizing the class boundaries based on receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and the estimate of an uncertainty region, thus optimising the model for a screening application.
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