N. Boens et al., Testing the identifiability of a model for reversible intermolecular two-state excited-state processes, J CHEM PHYS, 112(19), 2000, pp. 8260-8266
The modeling of excited-state processes in photophysics can conveniently be
done within the framework of compartmental analysis. In compartmental anal
ysis substantial attention has been devoted to the study of deterministic i
dentifiability, which verifies whether it is possible to determine the para
meters of the compartmental model from error-free data. In this paper the s
imilarity transformation approach is applied to the identifiability problem
of the photophysical model for reversible intermolecular two-state excited
-state processes. This method provides straightforward relations between th
e true and alternative sets of the system parameters. This allows one to ex
plore directly the parameter space for identifiability. Since absolute valu
es for the spectral parameters associated with excitation and emission are
not available from time-resolved fluorescence experiments, the original sim
ilarity transformation approach to the identifiability problem was reformul
ated in terms of normalized spectral parameters, which are experimentally a
ccessible. It is shown that six decay traces-measured at two coreactant con
centrations and three emission wavelengths-are required for the model to be
locally identifiable. Two sets of rate constants and associated spectral p
arameters may be found under these conditions. Enclosure in the analysis of
the monoexponential decay at very low coreactant concentration results in
global identifiability. The non-negativity requirement of the spectral para
meters also can lead to the unique solution. If the fluorescence decays are
independent of the emission wavelength, additional information about the p
hotophysical system is necessary for identifiability. (C) 2000 American Ins
titute of Physics. [S0021-9606(00)00218-X].