Abstract: Amethod for identifying the authenticity of Chinese Medicinal Material(CMM), using Fisher factor(FF) as chemical fingerprint features, is proposed. According to the principle of maximizing the distance among classes and minimizing the distance within classes, the weights of different peaks in chromatograms are calculated, and then a transformation vector is composed by these weights. FF can be obtained by multiplying the transformation vector with the vector composed of the area values of every peak selected based on user's threshold. As a typical example, identifying the authenticity of the main root of red ginseng was used to verify the effectivity of the proposed method. Comparing FFs with principal components and chromatographic peaks from three aspects of the quantitative evaluation, visual analysis and cluster analysis, it is shown that FFhas the highest accuracy in identifying the authenticity of the main root of red ginseng. Therefore, as a chemical fingerprint feature, FFcan be used to identify the authenticity of CMM.

Key words: Chemical fingerprinting analysis, Chemical fingerprint feature, Quality evaluation of Chinese Medicinal Material