Noise reduction for near-infrared spectroscopy data using extreme learning machines

Abstract The near infrared (NIR) spectra technique is an effective approach to predict chemical properties and it is typically applied in petrochemical, agricultural, medical, and environmental sectors. NIR spectra are usually of very high dimensions and contain huge amounts of information. Most of the information is irrelevant to the target problem and some is simply noise. Thus, it is not an easy task to discover the relationship between NIR spectra and the predictive variable. However, this kind of regression analysis is one of the main topics of machine learning. Thus machine learning techniques play a key role in NIR based analytical approaches. Pre-processing of NIR spectral data has become an integral part of chemometrics modeling. The objective of the pre-processing is to remove physical phenomena (noise) in the spectra in order to improve the regression or classification model. In this work, we propose to reduce the noise using extreme learning machines which have shown good predictive performances in regression applications as well as in large dataset classification tasks. For this, we use a novel algorithm called C-PL-ELM, which has an architecture in parallel based on a non-linear layer in parallel with another non-linear layer. Using the soft margin loss function concept, we incorporate two Lagrange multipliers with the objective of including the noise of spectral data. Six real-life dataset were analyzed to illustrate the performance of the developed models. The results for regression and classification problems confirm the advantages of using the proposed method in terms of root mean square error and accuracy.