A novel method which is a combination of wavelet packet transform (WPT), uninformative variable elimination by partial least squares (UVE-PLS) and simulated annealing (SA) to extract best variance information among different varieties of lubricants is presented. A total of 180 samples (60 for each variety) were characterized on the basis of visible and short-wave infrared spectroscopy (VIS-SWNIR), and 90 samples (30 for each variety) were randomly selected for the calibration set, whereas, the remaining 90 samples (30 for each variety) were used for the validation set. The spectral data was split into different frequency bands by WPT, and different frequency bands were obtained. SA was employed to look for the best variance band (BVB) among different varieties of lubricants. In order to improve prediction precision further, BVB was processed by UVE-PLS and the optimal cutoff threshold of UVE was found by SA. Finally, five variables were mined, and were set as inputs for a least square-support vector machine (LS-SVM) to build the recognition model. An optimal model with a correlation coefficient (R) of 0.9850 and root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 0.0827 was obtained. The overall results indicated that the method of combining WPT, UVE-PLS and SA was a powerful way to select diagnostic information for discrimination among different varieties of lubricating oil, furthermore, a more parsimonious and efficient LS-SVM model could be obtained.
Keywords: lubricant; simulated annealing algorithm; uninformative variable elimination; visual and short-wave spectroscopy; wavelet packet transform.