The rapid and accurate determination of calcium, magnesium, aluminium and silicon content in iron ore plays an important role in iron ore quality assessment. The accurate determination of calcium (CaO), magnesium (MgO), aluminium (Al2O3) and silicon (SiO2) in iron ore using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) remains a challenge due to the overfitting of multivariate analysis methods and matrix effects between different types of samples. In this paper, variable importance-back propagation artificial neural network (VI-BP-ANN) assisted LIBS was used for the first time to quantify the content of SiO2, Al2O3, CaO and MgO in iron ore. In this study, LIBS spectra of 12 representative samples of 244 batches of iron ore were collected, spectral pre-processing methods were optimised, the importance of LIBS spectral features was measured using random forest (RF), RF model parameters were optimised using out-of-bag (OOB) errors, and variable importance thresholds were used to optimise the input variables for the BP-ANN calibration model. The variable importance thresholds and the number of neurons were optimised by five-fold cross-validation (5-CV) of the coefficient of determination (R2) and root mean square error (RMSE). The results showed root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) for the SiO2, Al2O3, CaO, MgO content of the test samples were 0.372 3 wt%, 0.129 8 wt%, 0.052 4 wt% and 0.149 0 wt% respectively, with R2 of 0.977 1, 0.950 4, 0.987 8 and 0.997 7, respectively. Compared to using the same preprocessing method as input to the three PLS, SVM and RF models, the VI-BP- ANN model showed excellent performance in both the calibration dataset and prediction dataset. The results indicate that the combination of LIBS and VI-BP-ANN has the potential to achieve fast and accurate prediction of calcium, magnesium, aluminium and silicon content of iron ore in practical application.