Effects of nonlinearities and uncorrelated or correlated errors in realistic simulated data on the prediction abilities of augmented classical least squares and partial least squares

Comparisons of prediction models from the new augmented classical least squares (ACLS) and partial least squares (PLS) multivariate spectral analysis methods were conducted using simulated data containing deviations from the idealized model. The simulated data were based on pure spectral components derived from real near-infrared spectra of multicomponent dilute aqueous solutions. Simulated uncorrelated concentration errors, uncorrelated and correlated spectral noise, and nonlinear spectral responses were included to evaluate the methods on situations representative of experimental data. The statistical significance of differences in prediction ability was evaluated using the Wilcoxon signed rank test. The prediction differences were found to be dependent on the type of noise added, the numbers of calibration samples, and the component being predicted. For analyses applied to simulated spectra with noise-free nonlinear response, PLS was shown to be statistically superior to ACLS for most of the cases. With added uncorrelated spectral noise, both methods performed comparably. Using 50 calibration samples with simulated correlated spectral noise, PLS showed an advantage in 3 out of 9 cases, but the advantage dropped to 1 out of 9 cases with 25 calibration samples. For cases with different noise distributions between calibration and validation, ACLS predictions were statistically better than PLS for two of the four components. Also, when experimentally derived correlated spectral error was added, ACLS gave better predictions that were statistically significant in 15 out of 24 cases simulated. On data sets with nonuniform noise, neither method was statistically better, although ACLS usually had smaller standard errors of prediction (SEPs). The varying results emphasize the need to use realistic simulations when making comparisons between various multivariate calibration methods. Even when the differences between the standard error of predictions were statistically significant, in most cases the differences in SEP were small. This study demonstrated that unlike CLS, ACLS is competitive with PLS in modeling nonlinearities in spectra without knowledge of all the component concentrations. This competitiveness is important when maintaining and transferring models for system drift, spectrometer differences, and unmodeled components, since ACLS models can be rapidly updated during prediction when used in conjunction with the prediction augmented classical least squares (PACLS) method, while PLS requires full recalibration.