Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for improving the accuracy of ChemCam LIBS sub-model quantitative method

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a powerful tool for qualitative analysis of chemical composition on planetary surface. Specifically, the quantitative compositional analysis method is a significant challenge for LIBS instrument onboard the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity ChemCam. Partial Least Squares (PLS) sub-model strategy is one of the outstanding multivariate analysis methods for calibration modeling, which is firstly developed by ChemCam science team. However, a troubling key issue is there are many parameters that need to be optimized, which increases the uncertainty of predicting outcomes and is time-consuming. In this study, an automatic parameters selection method based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) tool is introduced. In the process of PSO iteration, RMSE minimization is taken as fitness, and finally the optimal sub-model parameters set is searched. In this way, the authors also get the best PLS latent variables of each sub-model by traversal method. Finally, the PSO PLS sub-model (PSO-PLS-SM) gets significant improvement in accuracy for the expanded Chemcam standards (408). And the RMSE of Si, Al, Ca, Na elements has been reduced by more than 20% relative to the conventional predictions.