Mid-infrared spectroscopy with an effective variable selection method based on MPA for glucose detection

Mid-infrared absorption spectroscopy is one of the most promising non-invasive blood glucose detection technologies. However, subsistent blood glucose detectors based on mid-infrared absorption spectroscopy technology are incapable of meeting the requirement of superior accuracy. Aimed at improving the prediction performance of glucose concentration in mid-infrared (MIR) spectra, an effective variable selection method (EVS) is proposed that generates the importance index for wavenumber to reduce the time cost. Tournament selection is then applied to avoid the reduction of exploration ability. L1 regularization is finally performed to tackle overfitting. 66 variables have been retained in the glucose fingerprint spectra by the proposed method, and the corresponding R and RMSEP are 0.93 and 32.22 mg/dL, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms five alternative approaches for variable selection from relevant literature, which is more accurate and robust. •ACR is proposed to generate the importance index of points.•An effective variable selection method based on MPA is reported to select informative variables.•ACR effectively evaluates the information of glucose concentration.•EVS gains the optimal correlation coefficient and RMSEP.•EVS can effectively avoid the accidental error.