This paper reports on analysis of 45 gasoline samples with different qualities, namely, octane number and chemical composition. Measurements of data from gas chromatography and IR (FTIR) spectroscopy are used to gasoline quality prediction and classification. The data were processed using principal component analysis (PCA) and fuzzy C means (FCM) algorithm. The data were then analyzed following the neural network paradigms, hybrid neural network and support vector machines (SVM) classifier. The IR spectra were compressed and denoised by the discrete wavelet analysis. Using the hybrid neural network and multi linear regression method (MLRM), excellent correlation between chemical composition of the gasoline samples and predicted value of the octane number was obtained. About 100% correct classification for six different categories of the gasoline was achieved, each of which has different qualities. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.