Chemometric tools factor analysis

Nowadays, generating huge amounts of data is relatively simple. That means Data Reduction and Interpretation using multivariate statistical tools (chemometrics), such as pattern recognition, factor analysis, and principal components analysis, can be critically important to extracting useful information from the data. These subjects have been introduced in Chapters 5 and 6. 

Kiers HAL, Smilde AK, Constrained three-mode factor analysis as a tool for parameter estimation with second-order instrumental data, Journal of Chemometrics, 1998, 12, 125-147. 

Exploratory data analysis aims to extract important information, detect outliers and identify relationships between samples and its use is recommended prior to the application of other chemometric techniques. Examples of the use of exploratory data analysis tools applied to separations data include principal component analyisis (PCA) (de la Mata-Espinosa et al., 2011a Ruiz-Samblas et al., 2011) and factor analysis (Stanimirova et al., 2011). 

Multivariate chemometric techniques have subsequently broadened the arsenal of tools that can be applied in QSAR. These include, among others. Multivariate ANOVA [9], Simplex optimization (Section 26.2.2), cluster analysis (Chapter 30) and various factor analytic methods such as principal components analysis (Chapter 31), discriminant analysis (Section 33.2.2) and canonical correlation analysis (Section 35.3). An advantage of multivariate methods is that they can be applied in... 

The multivariate tools typically used for the NIR-CI analysis of pharmaceutical products fall into two main categories pattern recognition techniques and factor-based chemometric analysis methods. Pattern recognition algorithms such as spectral correlation or Euclidian distance calculations basically determine the similarity of a sample spectrum to a reference spectrum. These tools are especially useful for images where the individual pixels yield relatively unmixed spectra. These techniques can be used to quickly define spatial distributions of known materials based on external reference spectra. Alternatively, they can be used with internal references, to locate and classify regions with similar spectral response. 

Thousands of chemical compounds have been identified in oils and fats, although only a few hundred are used in authentication. This means that each object (food sample) may have a unique position in an abstract n-dimensional hyperspace. A concept that is difficult to interpret by analysts as a data matrix exceeding three features already poses a problem. The art of extracting chemically relevant information from data produced in chemical experiments by means of statistical and mathematical tools is called chemometrics. It is an indirect approach to the study of the effects of multivariate factors (or variables) and hidden patterns in complex sets of data. Chemometrics is routinely used for (a) exploring patterns of association in data, and (b) preparing and using multivariate classification models. The arrival of chemometrics techniques has allowed the quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of multivariate data and, in consequence, it has allowed the analysis and modelling of many different types of experiments. 

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