Back to basics: qualitative analysis, introduction

Columns

01 Apr 2008

A.M.C. Davies
Norwich Near Infrared Consultancy, 75 Intwood Road, Cringleford, Norwich NR4 6AA, UK. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Tom Fearn
Department of Statistical Science, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

More “Back-to-basics”

In December 2004 I made the decision that this column should make a return visit to topics in quantitative analysis that had been covered (or sometimes just mentioned) in previous columns. Within seconds of that decision I realised that we would need to treat qualitative analysis to the same revision. The quantitative aspects turned out to be a three year marathon∗ journey but we have at last arrived at the start of what was conceived as “Part 2”.

I have been working on problems in qualitative analysis for 40 years! That’s before chemometrics as a topic began and I regard them as being much more demanding than quantitative analysis. There are several reasons for this, some more obvious than others:

qualitative analysis is not a single problem,
some humans are very good at looking at spectra and making qualitative decisions,
solutions require more statistics than are needed for quantitative analysis.