Consensual Regression of Lasso-Sparse PLS models for Near-Infrared Spectra of Food

In some cases, near-infrared spectra (NIRS) make the prediction of quantitative models unreliable, and the choice of a suitable number of latent variables (LVs) for partial least square (PLS) is difficult. In this case, a strategy of fusing member models with important information is gradually becoming valued in recent research. In this work, a series of PLS regression models were developed with an increasing number of LVs as member models. Then, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) was employed as the model’s selection access to sparse uninformative ones among these PLS member models. Deviation weighted fusion (DW-F), partial least squares regression coefficient fusion (PLS-F), and ridge regression coefficient fusion (RR-F) were comparatively used further to fuse the above sparsed member models, respectively. Three spectral datasets, including six attributes in NIR data of corn, apple, and marzipan, respectively, were applied in order to validate the feasibility of this fusion algorithm. Six fusion models of the above attributes performed better than the general optimal PLS model, with a noticeable enhancement of root mean errors squared of prediction (RMSEP) arriving at its highest at 80%. It also reduced more than half of the spectral bands; the DW-F especially showed its excellent fusing capacity and obtained the best performance. Results show that the preferred strategy of DW-F model combined with Lasso selection can make full use of spectral information, and significantly improve the prediction accuracy of fusion models.