Investigation of Direct Model Transferability Using Miniature Near-Infrared Spectrometers

Recent developments in compact near infrared (NIR) instruments, including both handheld and process instruments, have enabled easy and affordable deployment of multiple instruments for various field and online or inline applications. However, historically, instrument-to-instrument variations could prohibit success when applying calibration models developed on one instrument to additional instruments. Despite the usefulness of calibration transfer techniques, they are difficult to apply when a large number of instruments and/or a large number of classes are involved. Direct model transferability was investigated in this study using miniature near-infrared (MicroNIR™) spectrometers for both classification and quantification problems. For polymer classification, high cross-unit prediction success rates were achieved with both conventional chemometric algorithms and machine learning algorithms. For active pharmaceutical ingredient quantification, low cross-unit prediction errors were achieved with the most commonly used partial least squares (PLS) regression method. This direct model transferability is enabled by the robust design of the MicroNIR™ hardware and will make deployment of multiple spectrometers for various applications more manageable.