Application of pattern recognition in a factor analysis–spectrophotometric method for the simultaneous determination of rare earth elements in geological samples

Abstract

A factor analysis–spectrophotometric method was used to determine simultaneously 15 rare earth elements (REEs) in the REE–tribromochlorophosphonazo system. It adopts the singular value decomposition method to decompose the original data matrix of absorbance and the iterative target transformation factor analysis method to carry out the quantitative analysis. Because a pattern recognition method was used to optimize the calibration model, the accuracy of the analytical results was apparently increased. The standard deviations were 3.8 × 10^–4–5.5 × 10^–2 and the relative standard deviations were 0.22–3.5%. A detailed discussion is given of the selection of the calibration model and the features of classification.