Including all available data when developing equations to relate midinfrared spectra to a phenotype may be suboptimal for poorly represented spectra. Here, an alternative local changepoint approach was developed to predict six milk technological traits from midinfrared spectra. Neighbours were objectively identified for each predictand as those most similar to the predictand using the Mahalanobis distances between the spectral principal components, and subsequently used in partial least square regression (PLSR) analyses. The performance of the local changepoint approach was compared to that of PLSR using all spectra (global PLSR) and another LOCAL approach, whereby a fixed number of neighbours was used in the prediction according to the correlation between the predictand and the available spectra. Global PLSR had the lowest RMSEV for five traits. The local changepoint approach had the lowest RMSEV for one trait; however, it outperformed the LOCAL approach for four traits. When the 5% of the spectra with the greatest Mahalanobis distance from the centre of the global principal component space were analysed, the local changepoint approach outperformed the global PLSR and the LOCAL approach in two and five traits, respectively. The objective selection of neighbours improved the prediction performance compared to utilising a fixed number of neighbours; however, it generally did not outperform the global PLSR.
Keywords: local changepoint analysis; midinfrared spectroscopy; neighbours.