Prediction of Soil-Available Potassium Content with Visible Near-Infrared Ray Spectroscopy of Different Pretreatment Transformations by the Boosting Algorithms

The application of visible near-infrared (VIS-NIR) analysis technology to quantify the nutrients in soil has been widely recognized. It is important to improve the performance of regression models that can predict the soil-available potassium concentration. This study collected soil samples from southern Anhui, China, and concentrated on the modelling methods by using 29 pretreatment methods. The results show that a combination of three methods, Savitzky-Golay, standard normal variate, and dislodge tendency, exhibited better stability than others because it was the most capable of achieving levels A and B of the ratio of performance of deviation. The boosting algorithms that form an ensemble of multiple weak predictors exhibited better performance than partial least square (PLS) regression and support vector regression (SVR) for the prediction of soil-available potassium. These regression models could be employed to precisely predict the soil-available potassium concentration.