An efficient method of wavelength interval selection based on random frog for multivariate spectral calibration

•Wavelength interval selection method: considers all the possible spectral intervals.•A new idea: choose the best intervals from all the ranked overlapping intervals.•More efficient compared with other wavelength interval selection methods.

Wavelength selection is a critical step for producing better prediction performance when applied to spectral data. Considering the fact that the vibrational and rotational spectra have continuous features of spectral bands, we propose a novel method of wavelength interval selection based on random frog, called interval random frog (iRF). To obtain all the possible continuous intervals, spectra are first divided into intervals by moving window of a fix width over the whole spectra. These overlapping intervals are ranked applying random frog coupled with PLS and the optimal ones are chosen. This method has been applied to two near-infrared spectral datasets displaying higher efficiency in wavelength interval selection than others. The source code of iRF can be freely downloaded for academy research at the website: http://code.google.com/p/multivariate-calibration/downloads/list.

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