Highly identification of keemun black tea rank based on cognitive spectroscopy: Near infrared spectroscopy combined with feature variable selection.

From the perspective of combating fraud issues and examining keemun black tea properties, there was a contemporary urgent demand for a keemun black tea rankings identification system. Current rapid evaluation systems had been mainly developed for green tea grade evaluation, but there was space for improvement to establish a highly robust model. The present study proposed cognitive spectroscopy that combined near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) with multivariate calibration and feature variable selection methods. We defined "cognitive spectroscopy" as a protocol that selects characteristic information from complex spectral data and showed optimal results without human intervention. 700 samples representing keemun black tea from seven quality levels were scanned applying an NIR sensor. To differentiate which wavelength variables of the acquired NIRS data carry key and feature information regarding keemun black tea grades, there were four different variables screening approaches, namely genetic algorithm (GA), successive projections algorithm (SPA), competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS), and shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA), were compared in this study. Cognitive models were developed using least squares support vector machine (LSSVM), back propagation neural network (BPNN) and random forest (RF) methods combined with the optimized characteristic variables from the above variables selection algorithms for the identification of keemun black tea rank quality. Experimental results showed that all cognitive models utilizing the SFLA approach achieved steady predictive results based on eight latent variables and selected thirteen characteristic wavelength variables. The CARS-LSSVM model with the best predictive performance was proposed based on selecting ten characteristic latent variables, and the best performance indicators of the model were as follows: the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) was 0.0413, the correlation coefficients of prediction set (Rp) was 0.9884, and the correct discriminant rate (CDR) was 99.01% in the validation process. This study demonstrated that cognitive spectroscopy represented a proper strategy for the highly identification of quality rankings of keemun black tea.