LAUSR

Focus in quality assessment of iron ore is the content of total iron (TFe). Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) technology possesses the merits of rapid, in situ, real-time multielement analysis for iron ore, but its application to quantitative TFe content is subject to interference of the iron matrix effect and the lack of suitable data mining tools. Here, a new method of LIBS-based variable importance back propagation artificial neural network (VI-BP-ANN) for quantitative TFe content in iron ore was first proposed. After the LIBS spectra of 80 representative iron samples were obtained, random forest (RF) was optimized by out-of-bag (OOB) error and then used to measure and rank variable importance. The variable importance thresholds and the number of neurons were optimized with five-fold cross-validation (CV) with correlation coefficient (R2) and root mean square error (RMSE). With using only 1.40% of full spectral variables to construct BP-ANN model, the resulted R2, the root mean squared error of prediction (RMSEP) and the modeling time of the final VI-BP-ANN model was 0.9450, 0.3174 wt%, and 24 s, respectively. Compared with full spectrum-based model, for example, BP-ANN, RF, support vector machine (SVM), and PLS and VI-RF model, the VI-BP-ANN model reduced overfitting and obtained the highest R2 and the lowest RMSE both for calibration and prediction. Meanwhile, the characteristics of variables selected by VI were analyzed. In addition to the elemental emission lines of Ca, Al, Na, K, Mn, Si, Mg, Ti, Zr, and Li, partial spectral baselines of 540–610 nm and 820–970 nm were also selected as characteristic variables, which indicated that VI can take into full consideration the elemental interactions and the spectral baselines. Our approach shows that LIBS combined with VI-BP-ANN is able to quantify TFe content rapidly and accurately in iron ore. Graphical Abstract