Near infrared reflectance spectrometry classification of cigarettes using the successive projections algorithm for variable selection

This paper proposes a methodology for cigarette classification employing Near Infrared Reflectance spectrometry and variable selection. For this purpose, the Successive Projections Algorithm (SPA) is employed to choose an appropriate subset of wavenumbers for a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) model. The proposed methodology is applied to a set of 210 cigarettes of four different brands. For comparison, Soft Independent Modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) is also employed for full-spectrum classification. The resulting SPA-LDA model successfully classified all test samples with respect to their brands using only two wavenumbers (5058 and 4903 cm⁻¹). In contrast, the SIMCA models were not able to achieve 100% of classification accuracy, regardless of the significance level adopted for the F-test. The results obtained in this investigation suggest that the proposed methodology is a promising alternative for assessment of cigarette authenticity.