A NIR data set is the object of a chemometric contest at ‘Chimiométrie 2004’

The organisation committee of the symposium 'Chimiométrie 2004' (http://www.chimiometrie.org/) held in Paris (30th November and 1st December) proposed on their web site a NIR data set. This data set contained 194 spectra of minced meat taken on an Infratec-Tecator instrument between 850 and 1050 nm. The participants were asked to present during the conference their own approaches to calibrate and predict two independent and blind test sets. The committee received nine answers and this paper summarizes the different ways the data were treated by the participants and the proposed approach of the authors. The conference session was quite interesting and considered valuable for a publication by the committee and the participants. The prediction performances expressed by the RMSEP vary within a ratio of 10 between the extremes values. Due to the non-linearity, methods based on classification gave the best prediction models. A simple ANN model gave the best results.