Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy combined with chemometrics methods has been used to detect adulteration of honey samples. The sample set contained 135 spectra of authentic (n = 68) and adulterated (n = 67) honey samples. Spectral data were compressed using wavelet transformation (WT) and principal component analysis (PCA), respectively. In this paper, five classification modeling methods including least square support vector machine (LS-SVM), support vector machine (SVM), back propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and K-nearest neighbors (KNN) were adopted to correctly classify pure and adulterated honey samples. WE proved more effective than PCA, as a means for variables selection. Best classification models were achieved with LS-SVM. A total accuracy of 95.1% and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.952 for test set were obtained by LS-SVM. The results showed that WT-LS-SVM can be as a rapid screening technique for detection of this type of honey adulteration with good accuracy and better generalization. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.