Selection method of quasi-continuous wavelength combination with applications to the near-infrared spectroscopic analysis of soil organic matter.

Equidistant combination multiple linear regression (EC-MLR) for the quasi-continuous wavelength selection of spectroscopic analysis was proposed and successfully applied to the reagent-free determination of soil organic matter with near-infrared spectroscopy. For comparison, the continuous-mode moving window partial least squares (MWPLS) and the discrete-mode successive projections algorithm (SPA) were improved by considering the stability and applied to the same analysis object as well. All methods exhibited good effect, but the modeling accuracy, stability, and validation effect of EC-MLR were better than that of the other two methods. Compared with MWPLS, the optimal EC-MLR model contained only 16 wavelengths, and method complexity was substantially reduced. Compared with SPA-MLR, the optimal EC-MLR model could easily undergo spectral preprocessing to improve predictive capability. Moreover, appropriate equidistant discrete wavelength combination with EC-MLR corresponded to the spectral absorption band with proper resolution and can effectively overcome co-linearity interruption for the MLR model. Thus, the EC-MLR method has great potential in practical application and instrument design.