Investigation of Calibration-Free Resolution Techniques and Independent Component Analysis

Abstract Calibration-free resolution techniques provide an alternative approach to the development of a calibration model. These combine spectroscopic measurement coupled with mathematical and statistical assumptions and give spectral profiles and non-quantitative concentration profiles for the unknown mixture. In this paper, a number of calibration free techniques including VARIMAX. ITTFA, EFA, FSWEFA, SIMPLISMA are described and applied to a synthetic spectral data set and the results are compared with the complementary technique of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) in particular FastICA and JADE. The results were comparable in all cases with ICA separating the signal from the constituent components successfully.