An Effective Prediction Approach for Moisture Content of Tea Leaves Based on Discrete Wavelet Transforms and Bootstrap Soft Shrinkage Algorithm

The traditional method used to determine the moisture content of tea leaves is time consuming and destructive. To address this problem, an effective and non-destructive prediction method based on near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is proposed in this paper. This new method combines discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) with the bootstrap soft shrinkage algorithm (BOSS). To eliminate uninformative or interfering variables, DWT is applied to remove the noise in the spectral data by decomposing the origin spectrum into six layers. BOSS is used to select informative variables by reducing the dimensions of the sub-layers' reconstruction spectrum. After selecting the effective variables using DWT and BOSS, a prediction model based on partial least squares (PLS) is built. To validate effectiveness and stability of the prediction model, full-spectrum PLS, genetic algorithm PLS (GA-PLS), and interval PLS (iPLS) were compared with the proposed method. The experiment results illustrate that the proposed prediction model outperforms the other classical models considered in this study and shows promise for the prediction of the moisture content in Yinghong No. 9 tea leaves.