A variable selection method based on uninformative variable elimination for multivariate calibration of near-infrared spectra

Variable (or wavelength) selection plays an important role in the quantitative analysis of near-infrared (NIR) spectra. A modified method of uninformative variable elimination (UVE) was proposed for variable selection in NIR spectral modeling based on the principle of Monte Carlo (MC) and UVE. The method builds a large number of models with randomly selected calibration samples at first, and then each variable is evaluated with a stability of the corresponding coefficients in these models. Variables with poor stability are known as uninformative variable and eliminated. The performance of the proposed method is compared with UVE-PLS and conventional PLS for modeling the NIR data sets of tobacco samples. Results show that the proposed method is able to select important wavelengths from the NIR spectra, and makes the prediction more robust and accurate in quantitative analysis. Furthermore, if wavelet compression is combined with the method, more parsimonious and efficient model can be obtained.