A New Method for Spectral Wavelength Selection Based on Multiple Linear Regression Combined with Ant Colony Optimization and Genetic Algorithm

Wavelength selection is one of the key steps in quantitative spectral analysis, which reduces the computation time while also improving the prediction accuracy of the model. In this paper, we propose a wavelength selection algorithm based on the ant colony optimization (ACO), in which the absolute value of the regression coefficient of the multiple linear regression (MLR) model is used as the basis for evaluating the importance of wavelengths, and the absolute value of the regression coefficient after full wavelength MLR modeling is used as the initial pheromone value of the ant colony optimization (MLR-ACO). In each iteration, the absolute value of the regression coefficient corresponding to each wavelength of the individual with the highest fitness value is used as the basis for a pheromone update. The crossover operator is introduced in MLR-ACO (MLR-ACO-GA), and the individuals with the top 100 fitness values in MLR-ACO are used as the initial population of the genetic algorithm (GA). A selected frequency of wavelengths greater than the threshold among MLR-ACO individuals is calculated. A number of coarse interval points are generated according to the selected frequency, and a coarse crossover operation is performed at the coarse interval points. Fine crossover points are randomly generated within the coarse interval, and fine crossover operations are performed within the coarse interval to exploit the potential of combining excellent individuals in MLR-ACO with each other as much as possible. MLR-ACO can well solve the problem of traditional ACO initial pheromone scarcity, and MLR-ACO-GA can avoid MLR-ACO falling into a local optimum to a certain extent and be more flexible in the selection of the number of wavelengths, which can give full play to the advantages of MLR-ACO.