Abstract To investigate the feasibility of NIR spectroscopy in the discrimination of genuine Chinese Yam，90 samples from three origins were collected and their near infrared diffuse reflectance spectra were acquired.Discriminant analysis was employed to create qualitative model，and several data pre-processing methods were explored.The results showed that genuine Chinese Yam was greatly different from other samples according to raw spectra and score plot of PCA.The discriminant analysis model with raw spectra after pretreatment of multiplicative scatter correction，2nd derivative and Savitzky-Golay filter smoothing，showed the best predicative ability( the percentage of correctly identified varieties were both 100% for the calibration sample set and validation sample set ).This research indicated that NIR diffuse reflection spectroscopy could be used for the rapid analysis of genuine Chinese Yam .