Quantitative methods for factor analysis

The aim of all the foregoing methods of factor analysis is to decompose a data-set into physically meaningful factors, for instance pure spectra from a HPLC-DAD data-set. After those factors have been obtained, quantitation should be possible by calculating the contribution of each factor in the rows of the data matrix. By ITTFA (see Section 34.2.6) for example, one estimates the elution profiles of each individual compound. However, for quantitation the peak areas have to be correlated to the concentration by a calibration step. This is particularly important when using a diode array detector because the response factors (absorptivity) may considerably vary with the compound considered. Some methods of factor analysis require the presence of a pure variable for each factor. In that case quantitation becomes straightforward and does not need a multivariate approach because full selectivity is available. 

In this section we focus on methods for the quantitation of a compound in the presence of an unknown interference without the requirement that this interference should be identified first or its spectrum should be estimated. Hyphenated methods are the main application domain. The methods we discuss are generalized rank annihilation method (GRAM) and residual bilinearization (RBL). 

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