Paulo, Ellisson H.de, Rech, André M., Weiler, Fábio H., Nascimento, Márcia H.C., Filgueiras, Paulo R., and Ferrão, Marco F.
The adulteration of soy-based beverages (SBBs) by adding water to increase profitability is a fraudulent practice that requires urgent solutions to ensure product integrity and consumer trust. Therefore, the use of infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) associated with chemometrics methods can be a quick and advantageous alternative to this problem. In this study, the one-class and multiclass methods applied to ATR-FTIR data to classify a set of 80 SBBs samples were used. The unequal dispersed classes (UNEQ), soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), data driven SIMCA (DD-SIMCA), and one-class random forest (OC-RF) methods were used for one-class modeling. Models were constructed using the non-adulterated samples as target class (TA) and the adulterated samples as non-target class (NT). The k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), dual class random forest (DC-RF), and dual class random forest with Monte Carlo sampling (DC-RF-MC) methods were used for multiclass modeling. For k-NN and PLS-DA, samples were organized into four classes (non-adulterated samples, adulterated with 5% v∙v−1, 10% v∙v−1, and 20% v∙v−1 of water). DC-RF models used the same class settings as one-class models. DD-SIMCA, PLS-DA, and DC-RF-MC showed accuracy of 100%. The results show the feasibility of ATR-FTIR and chemometrics models to identify adulterations by adding water. [Display omitted] • ATR-FTIR to detect water adulteration in soymilk samples. • Twenty samples of different flavors from three commercial brands were used. • DD-SIMCA can classify adulterated from unadulterated samples. • PLS-DA and DC-RF can discriminate samples containing 5%, 10%, and 20% v∙v−1 of water. • PLS-DA can differentiate samples with water adulteration starting at 5% v∙v−1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]