4. Conclusions
The application of UV–Vis spectrophotometry as an alternative
or complementary approach to tobacco classification was
assessed. The method was focused on the discrimination of commercial
tobacco products (cigarettes) with different as well as
similar qualitative composition. From the results it was concluded
that tobacco samples could be perfectly discriminated based on
the normalized UV–Vis spectrum of their aqueous extracts and
applying multivariate chemometric techniques like linear discriminant
analysis and classification and regression trees. Based on the
results obtained, the proposed protocol was deemed satisfactory
for supporting exclusionary hierarchy purposes for assessing the
authenticity of a sample or as corroborative evidence in forensic
examinations, since it can discriminate among samples with different
composition and provide evidence on the composition outliers.