A method for rapid quantitative analysis of epimedin A, B, C and icariin in Epimedium was developed based on Fourier transform near infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy, and by adopting high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD) as the reference method. Multivariate calibrations models were built by partial least squares regression (PLSR) based on the full absorbance spectra (10 000-4000 cm-1) or only the most informative key variables selected by the competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) method. In comparison, the accuracy of the CARS-PLSR method was apparentl...
