Factor analysis and X-ray absorption spectroscopy; Application to determination of individual chemical species and compounds

Ikeda, Atsushi  

Factor analysis (FA), one of the multivariate analysis methods that are frequently employed in chemometrics, is a powerful tool to extract physical/chemical information of pure components from the analytical data of the mixture of the components. Although FA has been applied mainly to the quantitative analysis in the field of analytical chemistry, its application to the qualitative analysis has been limited. This article aims at introducing FA to the qualitative analysis for determining the speciation/structure of individual chemical species/compounds by X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). The fundamental concept to extract physically/chemically meaningful information from XAS-FA is described, and some reported studies using XAS-FA for the qualitative determination of chemical species/compounds are summarized.