Determination of Parameter Uncertainty for Quantitative Analysis of Shaddock Peel Pectin using Linear and Nonlinear Near-infrared Spectroscopic Models

Fourier transform near-infrared spectrometry has been used in combination with multivariate chemometric methods for wide applications in agriculture and food analysis. In this paper, we used linear partial least square and nonlinear least square support vector machine regression methods to establish calibration models for Fourier transform near-infrared spectrometric determination of pectin in shaddock peel samples. In particular, the tunable kernel parameters of the linear and nonlinear models were set changing in a moderate range and were optimally selected in conjunction with a Savitzky–Golay smoother. The smoothing parameters and the linear/nonlinear modeling parameters were combined for simultaneous optimization. To investigate the robustness of calibration models, parameter uncertainty were estimated in a direct way for the optimal linear and nonlinear models. Our results show that the nonlinear least square support vector machine method gives more accurate predictive results and is substantially more robust compared to the spectral noise when compared with the linear partial least square regression. Furthermore, the optimized least square support vector machine model was evaluated by the randomly selected test samples and the model test effect was much satisfactory. We anticipate that these linear and nonlinear methods and the methodology of determination of model parameter uncertainty will be applied to other analytes in the fields of near-infrared or Fourier transform near-infrared spectroscopy.