Cognitive spectroscopy for evaluating Chinese black tea grades (Camellia sinensis): near‐infrared spectroscopy and evolutionary algorithms

Grading represents an essential criterion for the quality assurance of black tea. The main objectives of the study were to develop a highly robust model for Chinese black tea of seven grades based on cognitive spectroscopy.Cognitive spectroscopy was proposed to combine near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) with machine learning and evolutionary algorithms, selected feature information from complex spectral data and show the best results without human intervention. The NIRS measuring system was used to obtain the spectra of Chinese black tea samples of seven grades. The spectra acquired were preprocessed by standard normal variate transformation (SNV), multiplicative scatter correction (MSC) and minimum/maximum normalization (MIN/MAX), and the optimal pretreating method was implemented using principal component analysis combined with linear discriminant analysis algorithm. Three feature selection evolutionary algorithms, which were a genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), were compared to search the best preprocessed characteristic wavelengths. Cognitive models of Chinese black tea ranks were constructed using extreme learning machine (ELM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM) methods based on the selected characteristic variables. Experimental results revealed that the PSO-SVM model showed the best predictive performance with the correlation coefficients of prediction set (Rp ) of 0.9838, the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 0.0246, and the correct discriminant rate (CDR) of 98.70%. The extracted feature wavelengths were only occupying 0.18% of the origin.The overall results demonstrated that cognitive spectroscopy could be utilized as a rapid strategy to identify Chinese black tea grades. © 2020 Society of Chemical Industry.