CHEMICAL RANK ESTIMATION BY MULTIRESOLUTION ANALYSIS FOR 2-WAY DATA IN THE PRESENCE OF BACKGROUND

Resolution methods based on factor analysis are powerful approaches fo r qualitative and quantitative analysis of unknown multicomponent syst ems. A reliable assessment of the number of chemical species in the in vestigated system is of prime importance for a successful resolution. Unfortunately, this is confused very much in practice by instrumental and experimental difficulties, Spectral background and chromatographic drift are two of the most serious problems, which hamper not only the determination of the number of components in the analytical system, b ut also the final resolution of the mixture. In this paper, multiresol ution analysis (MA) based on orthogonal wavelet bases is introduced to remove the influence of complex backgrounds and furthermore to correc tly determine the number of components in a system. Making use of prop erties of backgrounds in two-way chromatographic data, the method need s no special assumption imposed upon the profiles of the baseline and the background spectra. Thus, most kinds of background can be eliminat ed regardless of their behaviors. Satisfactory results from computer s imulation and real analytical systems illustrate the feasibility of th e proposed procedure.