Using Cluster Analysis And Icp-Ms To Identify Groups Of Ecstasy Tablets In Sao Paulo State, Brazil

Keywords

chemometrics; clustering; data mining; ecstasy; forensic science; forensic toxicology; inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry

Abstract

The variations found in the elemental composition in ecstasy samples result in spectral profiles with useful information for data analysis, and cluster analysis of these profiles can help uncover different categories of the drug. We provide a cluster analysis of ecstasy tablets based on their elemental composition. Twenty-five elements were determined by ICP-MS in tablets apprehended by Sao Paulo's State Police, Brazil. We employ the K-means clustering algorithm along with C4.5 decision tree to help us interpret the clustering results. We found a better number of two clusters within the data, which can refer to the approximated number of sources of the drug which supply the cities of seizures. The C4.5 model was capable of differentiating the ecstasy samples from the two clusters with high prediction accuracy using the leave-one-out cross-validation. The model used only Nd, Ni, and Pb concentration values in the classification of the samples.

Publication Date

11-1-2017

Publication Title

Journal of Forensic Sciences

Volume

62

Issue

6

Number of Pages

1479-1486

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.13448

Socpus ID

85013290381 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85013290381

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