ADVANCES IN 2ND-ORDER CALIBRATION

Several multivariate methods are now available for the calibration of second-order or hyphenated instruments (e.g. GC/MS). When applied to bilinear data, it has been shown that calibration can be performed in the presence of unknown interferences - a significant advantage over first-order calibration. In this paper, non-bilinear rank annihilation (NBRA), a method which has the potential of handling, second-order non-bi-linear data, is studied through theoretical analysis and computer simulation. It is found that the second-order advantage can be carried over to non-bilinear data if a property defined as net analyte rank (NAR) holds for the analyte of interest. The net analyte signal (NAS) is defined accordingly for second-order calibration and the analogy to and difference from lower-order calibration are discussed. With NAS, some analytical figures of merit such as signal-to noise ratio, selectivity, sensitivity and limit of determination can be calculated for second order calibration. An application to MS/MS data is also given.