IntroductionNear-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a powerful analytical tool widely used to measure, both directly and indirectly, a large number of chemical and physical properties.1,2 However, the presence of the relatively weak and highly overlapping spectral bands in the NIR spectra requires the use of multivariate calibration methods to extract the analytical information accurately. To construct a multivariate calibration model, one needs to measure the NIR spectra and the corresponding properties of samples in order to capture the variation in the sample properties to be predicted. 3 Frequently, the number of wavelength variables is much larger than that of concentration variables in order to get as more information as possible. 4 Inevitably, many wavelengths in the NIR spectra are useless, and the presence of them will degrade the performance of the regression model. 5 On the other hand, in practical situations, unexpected experimental or measurement noise is inevitably introduced into concentration (or dependent) variables as well as spectral data, 6 so it is reasonable to consider that the outliers introduced in the calibration set will be more prevalent. Outliers are data points that have a rather large influence on the regression solution and the occurrence of such data points can lead to considerable deviations from normality. 8 In this regard, many approaches for selection of wavelengths or detection of outliers have been proposed. Most authors focus on these problems separately. Up to now, very few methods have been adopted for eliminating both the uninformative wavelengths and the outliers because of some complexity. [9][10][11] Among few methods available, only the method called "iterative predictors and objects weighting PLS" (IPOW-PLS) 9 is applicable to NIR spectra. The method can assign suitable weights to both wavelengths and samples in the iterations of PLS1 algorithm. Weights of samples are dependent upon the values of the regression residuals, as done in iterative reweighted PLS (IRPLS), 12 and weights of wavelengths are obtained from the PLS regression coefficients and the standard deviation, as done in iterative predictor weighting PLS (IPW-PLS). 13 During the calculation of the weights of samples, the tuning constant in IPOW-PLS is the key parameter that defines a threshold beyond which a weight of zero is assigned to that sample. A different tuning constant for the same weight function can give different result, 7,8 and the data-dependent feature makes IPOW-PLS inconstant and computationally complex. To solve this problem, we propose a new criterion in the modified version of IPOW-PLS to determine objectively the level at which the sample can be removed as an outlier or not. The criterion is based on the commonly used "3σ edit rule". 6 Another disadvantage of IPOW-PLS is that the calculation of IPOW-PLS will be rather time-consuming when the number of wavelengths is large, because IPOW-PLS is based on the iterations of PLS algorithm. In order to expedite the IPOW-PLS calculation, we pro...