Coal seam in-situ inorganic analysis based on least angle regression and competitive adaptive reweighted sampling algorithm by XRF–visNIR fusion

The fusion of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) and visible near infrared spectroscopy (visNIR) has been widely used in geological exploration. The outer product analysis (OPA) has a good effect in the fusion. The dimension of the spectral matrix obtained by OPA is large, and the Competitive Adaptive Reweighted Sampling (CARS) cannot cover the whole spectrum. As a result, the selected variables by the method are inconsistent each time. In this paper, a new feature variable screening method is proposed, which uses the Least Angle Regression (LAR) to select the high dimensional spectral matrix first, and then uses CARS to complete the secondary selection of the spectral matrix, forming the LAR-CARS algorithm. The purpose is to make the sampling method cover all the spectral data. XRF and visNIR tests were carried out on three cores in two boreholes, and a cross-validation set, validation set and a test set were established by combining the results of wavelength dispersion X-ray fluorescence spectrometer and ITRAX Core scanner in the laboratory. The quantitative model was established with the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and LAR-CARS was compared to these other algorithms (LAR, Successive Projections Algorithm, Monte Carlo uninformative variables elimination and CARS). The results showed that the RMSEP values of the models established by the LAR-CARS for six rock-forming elements (Si, Al, K, Ca, Fe, Ti) were relatively small, and the RPD ranges from 1.424 to 2.514. All these results show that the high-dimensional matrix formed by XRF and visNIR integration combined with LAR-CARS can be used for quantitative analysis of rock forming elements in in-situ coal seam cores, and the analysis results can be used as the basis for judging lithology. The research will provide necessary technical support for digital mine construction.