Traceability of honey origin based on volatiles pattern processing by artificial neural networks

Head-space solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME)-based procedure, coupled to comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC x GC-TOF-MS), was employed for fast characterisation of honey volatiles. In total, 374 samples were collected over two production seasons in Corsica (n = 219) and other European countries (n = 155) with the emphasis to confirm the authenticity of the honeys labelled as "Corsica" (protected denomination of origin region). For the chemometric analysis, artificial neural networks with multilayer perceptrons (ANN-MLP) were tested. The best prediction (94.5%) and classification (96.5%) abilities of the ANN-MLP model were obtained when the data from two honey harvests were aggregated in order to improve the model performance compared to separate year harvests. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.