Application of chemometric analysis to infrared spectroscopy for the identification of wood origin

In this study, the chemical characteristics of wood are used for plant taxonomic classification based on the current Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification (APG III System) for the division, class and subclass of woody plants. Infrared spectra contain information about the molecular structure and intermolecular interactions among the components in wood, but the understanding of this information requires multivariate techniques for the analysis of highly dense data sets. This article is written with the purposes of specifying the chemical differences among taxonomic groups and predicting the taxa of unknown samples with a mathematical model. Principal component analysis, t test, stepwise discriminant analysis and linear discriminant analysis were some of the multivariate techniques chosen. A procedure to determine the division, class, subclass and order of unknown samples was built with promising implications for future applications of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy in wood taxonomy classification.