Detection of Soluble Solids Content (SSC) in Pears Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Combined with LASSO–GWF–PLS Model

The soluble solids content (SSC) of pears is mainly composed of sugars, organic acids, and other soluble substances and is one of the important indices used to measure the sweetness and quality of pear juice. The SSC of pears is mainly composed of sugars, organic acids, amino acids, esters, alcohols, phenols, flavonoids, and other compounds, and different groups within these compounds have different characteristic absorption peaks corresponding to different characteristic wavelengths. Traditional methods such as genetic algorithm (GA) and competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) models used for screening characteristic wavelengths are mainly based on statistical methods, and characteristic wavelengths are selected by finding the wavelengths related to the changes in the concentration of the target analytes. By ignoring the molecular structure and chemical properties of the target analytes and disregarding the influence of the groups of the compounds in the target analytes on the spectral characteristics, wavelengths that are not related to the target analytes may be selected, thus affecting the accuracy of the analytical results. In this paper, a partial least squares (PLS) model was established based on the characteristic wavelengths of CARS, GA, and LASSO algorithms, and the best least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) was selected and compared with the characteristic wavelengths selected by group weighted fusion (GWF). The LASSO regression was validated by 10-fold cross-validation to select the appropriate regularization parameter, and the 33 characteristic wavelengths correlated with the SSC of pears were selected in the full spectral range, and the 9 characteristic wavelengths corresponding to the group response were weighted and fused and input into the PLS regression model. Using an established model, the coefficient of determination ( R 2 ) and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the calibration set were 0.992 and 0.177%, respectively, and the R 2 and RMSE of the test set were 0.998 and 0.128%, respectively. The R 2 of our LASSO–GWF–PLS prediction model was improved from 0.975 to 0.998, indicating that the LASSO–GWF–PLS method has very good prediction ability for detection of SSC in pears.