Spectral power distribution (SPD) is the radiation power intensity at different wavelengths, containing the most basic photometric and colorimetric performance of the illuminant, which is able to predict the lifetime of LEDs. This paper proposes an SPD model assisted by machine learning algorithms to detect the early failure of white LEDs. The SPD features of 3W high-power white LEDs were firstly extracted by the statistical models of Gaussian, Lorentz, and Asym2sig functions. An unsupervised learning method, principal component analysis (PCA), was then used to reduce the extracted features parameters’ dimensions. Next a K-nearest neighbor (KNN)-based method was used to detect LEDs’ anomalies by dividing the main cluster into groups, and estimating the distance from the center of mass of each cluster to the test point. The results showed the following: (1) for selected white LEDs, the Asym2sig function has a better fitting result than Gaussian and Lorentz functions; (2) machine learning methods can significantly assist in LED anomaly detection and can decrease the amount of anomaly detection time to 789.6 h, compared to the 1311 h when lumen maintenance degradation reaches 70% as required by IES TM21.@en