Near infrared spectroscopic variable selection by a novel swarm intelligence algorithm for rapid quantification of high order edible blend oil

[Display omitted] •It was the first attempt to quantification of single oil in hexanary edible blend oil by near infrared spectroscopy combined with chemometrics.•Discretized whale optimization algorithm was first developed for spectral variable selection.•The whale population performance, iteration number and whale number of WOA were investigated. The quantification of single oil in high order edible blend oil is a challenging task. In this research, a novel swarm intelligence algorithm, discretized whale optimization algorithm (WOA), was first developed for reducing irrelevant variables and improving prediction accuracy of hexanary edible blend oil samples. The WOA is inspired by hunting strategy of humpback whales, which mainly includes three behaviors, i.e., encircling prey, bubble-net attacking and searching for prey. In discretized WOA, positions of whales were updated and then discretized by arctangent function. The whale population performance, iteration number and whale number of WOA were investigated. To validate the performance of selected variables, partial least squares (PLS) was used to build model and predict single oil contents in hexanary blend oil. Results show that WOA-PLS can provide the best prediction accuracy compared with full-spectrum PLS, continuous wavelet transform-PLS (CWT-PLS), uninformative variable elimination-PLS (UVE-PLS), Monte Carlo uninformative variable elimination-PLS (MCUVE-PLS) and randomization test-PLS (RT-PLS). Furthermore, CWT-WOA-PLS can further produce better results with fewer variables compared with WOA-PLS.