Rapid quality evaluation and geographical origin recognition of ginger powder by portable NIRS in tandem with chemometrics.

• A portable NIRS quantification of 6-gingerol in ginger powder was developed. • Real ginger powder from different geographical origins were modeled and recognized. • NIRS analysis of ginger can be considered not just in lab but also at casual inspection. Ginger powder is an important spice that is susceptible to improper sales such as adulteration or geographical fraud. In this study, a portable near infrared spectroscopy was used to quantitatively predict the 6-gingerol content, an important quality index of ginger, as well as to identify the gingers from three origins in China. Specifically, the optimal preprocessing method was first investigated by comparing the predictions of models. Then three feature variable selection methods including PCA, CARS, and RFrog, on the quantitative analysis of 6-gingerol were also compared, respectively. After comparison, the PLS model established on the S-G combined with SNV preprocessing outperformed the others. The PLS regression of 6-gingerol with variables selected by RFrog possessed the R c 2 of 0.9463, R p 2 of 0.9497, and the RPD of 4.2257, respectively. Moreover, the results further verified that the LDA model by SPA variables extraction successfully identify gingers from different origins with 100 % accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]