Identification of green tea’s (Camellia sinensis (L.)) quality level according to measurement of main catechins and caffeine contents by HPLC and support vector classification pattern recognition

High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was identified green tea's quality level by measurement of catechins and caffeine content. Four grades of roast green teas were attempted in this work. Five main catechins ((−)-epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), (−)-epigallocatechin (EGC), (−)-epicatechin gallate (ECG), (−)-epicatechin (EC), and (+)-catechin (C)) and caffeine contents were measured simultaneously by HPLC. As a new chemical pattern recognition, support vector classification (SVC) was applied to develop identification model. Some parameters including regularization parameter (R) and kernel parameter (K) were optimized by the cross-validation. The optimal SVC model was achieved with R = 20 and K = 2. Identification rates were 95% in the training set and 90% in the prediction set, respectively. Finally, compared with other pattern recognition approaches, SVC algorithm shows its excellent performance in identification results. Overall results show that it is feasible to identify green tea's quality level according to measurement of main catechins and caffeine contents by HPLC and SVC pattern recognition.