Supervised and penalized baseline correction

Spectroscopic measurements can show distorted spectral shapes arising from a mixture of absorbing and scattering contributions. These distortions (or baselines) often manifest themselves as non-constant offsets or low-frequency oscillations. As a result, these baselines can adversely affect analytical and quantitative results. Baseline correction is an umbrella term where one applies pre-processing methods to obtain baseline spectra (the unwanted distortions) and then remove the distortions by differencing. However, current state-of-the art baseline correction methods do not utilize analyte concentrations even if they are available, or even if they contribute significantly to the observed spectral variability. We modify a class of state-of-the-art methods (penalized baseline correction) that easily admit the incorporation of a priori analyte concentrations such that predictions can be enhanced. This modified approach will be deemed supervised and penalized baseline correction (SPBC). Performance will be assessed on two near infrared data sets across both classical penalized baseline correction methods (without analyte information) and modified penalized baseline correction methods (leveraging analyte information). There are cases of SPBC that provide useful baseline-corrected signals such that they outperform state-of-the-art penalized baseline correction algorithms such as AIRPLS. In particular, we observe that performance is conditional on the correlation between separate analytes: the analyte used for baseline correlation and the analyte used for prediction—the greater the correlation between the analyte used for baseline correlation and the analyte used for prediction, the better the prediction performance.