In the present paper, an improved approach to the TR characteristic spectral selection is presented. For this approach, two ideas of TR1-norm and TR2-norm are used, two constraint items, spectral line distance and minimizing absolute value of coefficient are introduced, and a general formula of ill-posed optimization problem is established. The formula can reduce effectively the errors caused by experienced and experimental method when used in determining the regular matrix and parameter. Finally, the improved approach presented in the paper was used in the analysis of alkane gas mixture, with methane, ethane, propane, n-butane, iso-butane, n-pentane and iso-pentane included. The concentration range is 0.01%~20%. The experimental results show that the predicting error square is only 2.6×10-4, and the coefficient of determination is 0.959 2, which means that preceding accuracy is high, and that the practicability of TR regularization has been enhanced.