RESEARCH ARTICLE

Journal of Oil Palm Research Vol. 33 (2) June 2021, p. 227-234

A PROOF-OF-CONCEPT STUDY: DETERMINING THE GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGIN OF CRUDE PALM OIL WITH THE COMBINED USE OF GC-IMS FINGERPRINTING AND CHEMOMETRICS

GOGGIN, K A*; BRODRICK, E**; WICAKSONO, A‡; COVINGTON, J A‡; DAVIES, A N‡‡ and MURPHY, D J*

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21894/jopr.2021.0013
Received: 8 January 2020   Accepted: 16 April 2020   Published Online: 7 April 2021
ABSTRACT

Current administrative controls used to verify geographical provenance within palm oil supply chains require enhancement and strengthening by more robust analytical methods. In this study, the application of volatile organic compound fingerprinting, in combination with five different analytical classification models, has been used to verify the regional geographical provenance of crude palm oil samples. For this purpose, 108 crude palm oil samples were collected from two regions within Malaysia, namely Peninsular Malaysia (32) and Sabah (76). Samples were analysed by gas chromatography-ion mobility spectrometer (GC-IMS) and the five predictive models (Sparse Logistic Regression, Random Forests, Gaussian Processes, Support Vector Machines and Artificial Neural Networks) were built and applied. Models were validated using 10-fold cross-validation. The area under curve (AUC) measure was used as a summary indicator of the performance of each classifier. All models performed well (AUC 0.96) with the Sparse Logistic Regression model giving best performance (AUC = 0.98). This demonstrates that the verification of the geographical origin of crude palm oil is feasible by volatile organic compound fingerprinting, using GC-IMS supported by chemometric analysis.

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* Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science,
University of South Wales, Pontypridd,
CF37 1DL, United Kingdom.
E-mail: denis.murphy@southwales.ac.uk

** IMSPEX Diagnostics Ltd, Ty Menter Navigation Park,
Abercynon CF45 4SN, United Kingdom.

‡ School of Engineering, University of Warwick,
Library Rd, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom.

‡‡ Nouryon, 7418 AJ Zutphenseweg 10,
P.O. Box 10, 7400 AA, Deventer, The Netherlands.