Tackling a Complicated Spectrum

For a complicated spectrum, it may be helpful to operate on a reduced-size data set. Many spectrometers record absorbance readings at 1-nm intervals a complete UV-visible spectrum (200-700 nm) contains 500 data points. If the spectrum contains eight bands, you re performing calculations on more than 4000 cells. Start with a data set consisting of every 10th data point, for example. After you have achieved a reasonably good fit to this data set, use these values as initial parameters for the complete data set. 

It may be necessary to first minimize portions of the spectrum separately. 

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