A Comparison of Linear Regression Methods forthe Detection of Apple Internal Quality by Nearinfrared Spectroscopy

Hybrid linear analysis (HLA), partial least-squares (PLS) regression, and the linear least square support vector machine (LSSVM) were used to determinate the soluble solids content (SSC) of apple by Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy. The performance of these three linear regression methods was compared. Results showed that HLA could be used for the analysis of complex solid samples such as apple. The predictive ability of SSC model constructed by HLA was comparable to that of PLS. HLA was sensitive to outliers, thus the outliers should be eliminated before HLA calibration. Linear LSSVM performed better than PLS and HLA. Direct orthogonal signal correction (DOSC) pretreatment was effective for PLS and linear LSSVM, but not suitable for HLA. The combination of DOSC and linear LSSVM had good generalization ability and was not sensitive to outliers, so it is a promising method for linear multivariate calibration.