Simultaneous Measurement of Phenols Using Three-way Fluorescence Spectroscopy: a Comparison of N-PLS, U-PLS and PARAFAC Modeling

PARAFAC works well when the differences between the spectra of analytes are large, but may fail in extreme cases where the spectra severely overlap. Phenols with similar chemical structures emit the similar fluorescence spectra. The correlation coefficients of a computed spectrum with the two or more overlapped standard spectra may so close that PARAFAC gives wrong results in recognizing component and further in predicting concentration. So the new exploration should been given for much accurate identification and quantification.In this paper, unfolded partial least squares/residual bilinearization (U-PLS/RBL) and multi-way partial least square/residual-bilinearization (N-PLS/RBL) are studied to deal with fluorescence excitation-emission matrices (EEMs) for the direct determination of 5 phenols in different water samples.