Wavelength Selection Method Based on Absorbance Value Optimization to Near-Infrared Spectroscopic Analysis

Regarding absorption spectrum, high absorption corresponds to low light transmittance and relatively loud noise, whereas low absorption corresponds to low information content, which interferes with the modeling of spectral analysis. Appropriate absorbance level is necessary to improve spectral information content and reduces noise level. In this study, based on the selection of the upper and lower bounds of absorbance, the absorbance value optimization partial least squares (AVO-PLS) method was proposed for appropriate wavelength model selection. Near-infrared spectroscopic analysis of hyperlipidemia indicators, namely, total cholesterol (TC), and triglyceride (TG), was conducted to validate the predicted performance of AVO-PLS. Well-performed wavelength selection methods, namely, moving-window PLS (MW-PLS) of continuous type-and successive projections algorithm (SPA) of discrete type, were also conducted for comparison. The spectra were first corrected using Savitzky–Golay smoothing. Modeling was performed based on the multiple partitioning of calibration and prediction sets to avoid data over-fitting and achieve parameter stability. The selected absorbance ranged from 0.45 to 0.86 for TC and from 0.45 to 0.92 for TG, and the corresponding waveband combinations were 1,376–1,388 and 1,560–1840 nm for TC and 1,376–1,390 and 1,552–1,846 nm for TG. Among them, the waveband combination of TG covers TC’s one, and can be used for the high-precision cooperativity analysis of the two indicators. Using the independent validation samples, the RMSEP and RP of 0.164 mmol l−1 and 0.990 for TC and 0.096 mmol l−1 and 0.997 for TG were obtained by the cooperativity model. And the sensitivity and specificity for hyperlipidemia were 98.0 and 100%, respectively. These values were better than those of MW-PLS and SPA. Importantly, the proposed AVO-PLS is a novel multi-band optimization approach for improving prediction performance and applicability. This method is expected to obtain more applications.