Non-Destructive Determination of Moisture Content in White Tea During Withering Using VNIR Spectroscopy and Ensemble Modeling

As one of the six major traditional tea types in China, white tea’s quality formation is primarily influenced by the withering process. However, traditional methods for monitoring withering fail to achieve precise and stable control of moisture content. To address this issue, a total of 650 samples were collected at 13 withering time points (0–36 h), and the dataset was split into training and test sets at a 7:3 ratio. This study proposes a PRXBoost ensemble model for quantitative detection of withered white tea, which integrates data augmentation and intelligent algorithms. The ensemble model uses a Bagging-based weighted integration technique to combine Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR), Ridge, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models, and it conducts an in-depth analysis of the decision-making process within the PRXBoost model. First, the effectiveness of the data augmentation strategy and the superiority of the gradient descent algorithm are verified through pre-modeling based on the PLSR model and hyperparameter pre-search using the XGBoost model, respectively. Additionally, the Bayes algorithm is employed to optimize the weights of the sub-models, further enhancing the overall predictive performance. The results show that the PRXBoost model achieved the best performance among the compared models on the test set, with R2 = 0.854 and RMSE = 0.080, exceeding the highest R2 of a single model by 6%. These results indicate that PRXBoost provided improved predictive performance for moisture estimation within the current dataset. Finally, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) algorithm is used to analyze the influence of each input feature on the prediction results, successfully identifying the 1916 nm and 1453 nm spectral bands as significant influencers of the prediction outcomes. These results suggest that the proposed model can support rapid, non-destructive monitoring of moisture evolution and provide actionable information for withering endpoint decision control.