Journal Article

Estimation of Organic Carbon in Anthropogenic Soil by VIS-NIR Spectroscopy: Effect of Variable Selection

Hong, Yongsheng, Fei, Teng, Xu, Lu, Guo, Long, Liu, Yaolin, Chen, Yiyun, Liu, Yi, Jiang, Qinghu, Mouazen, Abdul M., Wei, Yu, Shi, Tiezhu

2020

Overview

Visible and near-infrared reflectance (VIS-NIR) spectroscopy is widely applied to estimate soil organic carbon (SOC). Intense and diverse human activities increase the heterogeneity in the relationships between SOC and VIS-NIR spectra in anthropogenic soil. This fact results in poor performance of SOC estimation models. To improve model accuracy and parsimony, we investigated the performance of two variable selection algorithms, namely competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) and random frog (RF), coupled with five spectral pretreatments. A total of 108 samples were collected from Jianghan Plain, China, with the SOC content and VIS-NIR spectra measured in the laboratory. Results showed that both CARS and RF coupled with partial least squares regression (PLSR) outperformed PLSR alone in terms of higher model accuracy and less spectral variables. It revealed that spectral variable selection could identify important spectral variables that account for the relationships between SOC and VIS-NIR spectra, thereby improving the accuracy and parsimony of PLSR models in anthropogenic soil. Our findings are of significant practical value to the SOC estimation in anthropogenic soil by VIS-NIR spectroscopy.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: Accuracy / Adaptive algorithms / Adaptive sampling / Algorithms / Anthropogenic factors / anthropogenic soil / anthropogenic soil types / Carbon / China / Datasets / estimation / Feature selection / frogs / Heterogeneity / Human influences / humans / Infrared reflection / Infrared spectroscopy / Laboratories / least squares / Least squares method / Libraries / Model accuracy / Near infrared radiation / Organic carbon / Organic soils / pretreatment / Principal components analysis / reflectance / Remote sensing / sampling / soil organic carbon / Soils / Spectra / spectral variable selection / Spectroscopy / Spectrum analysis / Variables / visible and near-infrared spectroscopy