Predicting with limited data - Increasing the accuracy in VIS-NIR diffuse reflectance spectroscopy by SMOTE

Abstract: Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy is a powerful technique to predict soil properties. It can be used in situ to provide data inexpensively and rapidly compared to the standard laboratory measurements. Because most spectral data bases contain air-dried samples scanned in the laboratory, field spectra acquired in situ are either absent or rare in calibration data sets. However, when models are calibrated on air-dried spectra, prediction using field spectra are often inaccurate. We propose a framework to calibrate partial least squares models when field spectra are rare using synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). We calibrated a model to predict soil organic carbon content using air-dried spectra spiked with synthetic field spectra. The root mean-squared error of prediction decreased from 6.18 to 2.12 mg g$^{-1}$ and $R^2$ increased from $-$0.53 to 0.82 compared to the model calibrated on air-dried spectra only.