Monitoring blood hemoglobin level is essential to diagnose anaemia disease. This study aims to evaluate the capability of an artificial neural network (ANN) and Savitzky Golay (SG) pre-processing in predicting the blood hemoglobin level based on the near-infrared spectrum. The effects of the hidden neuron number and different SG pre-processing strategies were examined and discussed. ANN coupled with first order SG derivative and five hidden neurons achieved better prediction performance with root mean square error of prediction of 0.3517 g/dL and Rp2 of 0.9849 compared to the previous studies. Results depict that ANN that coupled with first order SG derivative could improve near-infrared spectroscopic analysis in predicting blood hemoglobin level, and the proposed nonlinear model outperforms linear models without variable selections. This finding suggests that the modelling strategy is promising in establishing a better relationship between the blood hemoglobin and near-infrared spectral data
