Fig. 1

The ability of NIRS to predict the age of Ae. albopictus mosquitoes in days. a The best-fit regression coefficient function for the resampling PLS model trained on laboratory-reared mosquitoes showing the most informative regions of the spectrum. Grey lines show best-fit model for each of the 100 dataset randomisations whilst black line indicates the average. b Ability of the model to predict age of laboratory-reared mosquitoes. Boxplot thick horizontal black line shows the median/50th-percentile whilst the box edges, inner and outer whiskers show 25th/75th, 15th/85th and 5th/95th percentiles, respectively. Grey dashed line shows model with 100% accuracy. c Ability of the model trained on laboratory mosquitoes to predict the age of field-derived mosquitoes. Results can be compared to the simple PLS method presented in Additional file 1: Figure S1