Rice is one of the most important staple foods around the world. Authentication of rice is one of the most addressed concerns in the present literature, which includes recognition of its geographical origin and variety, certification of organic rice and many other issues. Good results have been achieved by multivariate data analysis and data mining techniques when combined with specific parameters for ascertaining authenticity and many other useful characteristics of rice, such as quality, yield and others. This paper brings a review of the recent research projects on discrimination and authentication of rice using multivariate data analysis and data mining techniques. We found that data obtained from image processing, molecular and atomic spectroscopy, elemental fingerprinting, genetic markers, molecular content and others are promising sources of information regarding geographical origin, variety and other aspects of rice, being widely used combined with multivariate data analysis techniques. Principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis are the preferred methods, but several other data classification techniques such as support vector machines, artificial neural networks and others are also frequently present in some studies and show high performance for discrimination of rice.

The application of Support Vector Machine (SVM) to classify food security in a northeast region in Brazil is explored. This type of application represents a novel use of the SVM in addressing contemporary social science questions. The results demonstrate an accuracy > 75% and a recall of 84% for classifying households that are food insecure. The variables identified by the model are consistent with contemporary theories of food security and vulnerability. The successful application of SVM in this instance and the growing availability of large-scale social science datasets suggest that data mining techniques will have a larger role to play in answering critical social science questions in the future.