Determination of free amino acid content in Radix Pseudostellariae using near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and different multivariate calibrations

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy combined with multivariate calibration was attempted to analyze free amino acid content of Radix Pseudostellariae. The original spectra of Pseudostellariae samples in wavelength range of 10000–4000 cm−1 were acquired. Partial least squares (PLS), kernel PLS (k-PLS), back propagation neural network (BP-NN), and support vector regression (SVR) algorithms were performed comparatively to develop calibration models. Some parameters of the calibration models were optimized by cross-validation. The performance of BP-NN model was better than PLS, k-PLS, and SVR models. The root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and the correlation coefficient (R) of BP-NN model were 0.687 and 0.889 in prediction set respectively. Results showed that NIR spectroscopy combined with multivariate calibration has significant potential in quantitative analysis of free amino acid content in Radix Pseudostellariae.