Paris polyphylla, as a traditional herb with long history, has been widely used to treat diseases in multiple nationalities of China. Nevertheless, the quality of P. yunnanensis fluctuates among from different geographical origins, so that a fast and accurate classification method was necessary for establishment. In our study, the geographical origin identification of 462 P. yunnanensis rhizome and leaf samples from Kunming, Yuxi, Chuxiong, Dali, Lijiang, and Honghe were analyzed by Fourier transform mid infrared (FT-MIR) spectra, combined with partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), random forest (RF), and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) methods. The obvious cluster tendency of rhizomes and leaves FT-MIR spectra was displayed by principal component analysis (PCA). The distribution of the variable importance for the projection (VIP) was more uniform than the important variables obtained by RF, while PLS-DA models obtained higher classification abilities. Hence, a PLS-DA model was more suitably used to classify the different geographical origins of P. yunnanensis than the RF model. Additionally, the clustering results of different geographical origins obtained by HCA dendrograms also proved the chemical information difference between rhizomes and leaves. The identification performances of PLS-DA and the RF models of leaves FT-MIR matrixes were better than those of rhizomes datasets. In addition, the model classification abilities of combination datasets were higher than the individual matrixes of rhizomes and leaves spectra. Our study provides a reference to the rational utilization of resources, as well as a fast and accurate identification research for P. yunnanensis samples.
Keywords: Fourier transform infrared; Paris polyphylla Smith var. yunnanensis; chemometrics; multivariate analysis.