Application of chemometric methods to XRF-data - A tutorial review.

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry is a modern method of element analysis, widely applied in forensic science, archeology, geochemistry and other fields. Chemometric data processing tools and approaches may help XRF to become even more informative. These tools allow for convenient data visualization, exploration of hidden relations in the data, classification of samples and quantitative treatment of noisy and overlapped spectra. This review describes the most popular chemometric techniques employed in XRF studies and provides typical examples of such applications.