A bootstrap aggregated model approach to the estimation of product quality in refineries with varying crudes is proposed in this paper. The varying crudes cause the relationship between process variables and product quality variables to change, which makes product quality estimation by soft-sensors a difficult problem. The essential idea in this paper is to build an inferential estimation model for each type of feed oil and use an on-line feed oil classifier to determine the feed oil type. Bootstrap aggregated neural networks are used in developing the on-line feed oil classifier and a bootstrap aggregated partial least square regression model is developed for each data group corresponding to each type of feed crude oil. The amount of training data in crude oil distillation is usually small and this brings difficulties for classification and estimation modelling. In order to enhance model reliability and robustness, bootstrap aggregated models are developed. The inferential estimation results of kerosene dry point on both simulated data and industrial data show that the proposed method can significantly improve the overall inferential estimation performance. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.