Application of data mining methods for classification and prediction of olive oil blends with other vegetable oils

The aim of this article is to study tree-based ensemble methods, new emerging modelling techniques, for authentication of samples of olive oil blends to check their suitability for classifying the samples according to the type of oil used for the blend as well as for predicting the amount of olive oil in the blend. The performance of these methods has been investigated in chromatographic fingerprint data of olive oil blends with other vegetable oils without needing either to identify or to quantify the chromatographic peaks. Different data mining methods—classification and regression trees, random forest and M5 rules—were tested for classification and prediction. In addition, these classification and regression tree approaches were also used for feature selection prior to modelling in order to reduce the number of attributes in the chromatogram. The good outcomes have shown that these methods allow one to obtain interpretable models with much more information than the traditional chemometric methods and provide valuable information for detecting which vegetable oil is mixed with olive oil and the percentage of oil used, with a single chromatogram.