The seventy samples of Polygoni Multiflori Radix were collected from three producing areas: Bozhou, Anhui province, Jingmen, Hubei province and Xichang, Sichuan province. Three stable isotope ratios and contents of 44 elements in the Polygoni Multiflori Radix samples were determined by EA-IR-MS and HR-ICP-MS. Three data mining methods，including partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), fisher linear discriminant analysis (FLDA) and decision tree CHAID were employed to establish a model for geographical origin discrimination．The study results showed that the stable isotope ratios expressed significant difference followed with the different producing areas, and will be used to discern the samples from different producing areas, effectively. Combined with the data of elemental analysis, the accuracy rates of model can be further improved. All the three methods showed the accuracy rates of external sample were over 90% using training dataset. These results confirmed that stable isotope ratios and multi-elemental analysis combined with chemometric method was effectiv in geographical tracing of Polygoni Multiflori Radix．The analysis method has great potential and prospect in geographical origin discriminant of Chinese medicinal materials, and provids a new study method to identify origin information of Chinese medicinal materials.
Keywords: Polygoni Multiflori Radix; elemental analysis; geographical origin discriminant; multiveriate statistics; stable isotope ratios.
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