Factor analysis method for fluorescence excitation emission matrix

Abstract

The fluorescence excitation-emission matrix (EEM) has been widely applied to identify and track the fluorescent components in complex samples. Factor analysis (FA) is one of the important methods used to mine information from EEM. However, EEM is actually a sparse matrix, consisting of a number of non-measured data in the cases of the excitation wavelength longer than the emission one. These data were identified as additional components by the traditional FA algorithm. An improved algorithm that only the experimental data in EEM were essentially collected for FA was developed for eliminating the impact of these data.