A chemometric approach has been developed for characterization of gasoline samples regarding their quality. Attenuated total reflectance - infrared spectrometric data were processed by genetic algorithm (GA) and successive projection algorithm (SPA) feature selection techniques, being employed as an initial step prior to apply a discriminative tool. It was aimed to classify the fuel samples according to their quality passed/failed data. Chemometric predictive procedures were developed using quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) combined with GA and SPA as a feature subset and feature selection strategy. Results showed 93.3% and 95.6% accuracy for SPA-QDA and GA-QDA models respectively. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.