Vibrational overtone combination spectroscopy (VOCSY)-a new way of using IR and NIR data

This work explores a novel method for rearranging 1st order (one-way) infra-red (IR) and/or near infra-red (NIR) ordinary spectra into a representation suitable for multi-way modelling and analysis. The method is based on the fact that the fundamental IR absorption and the first, second, and consecutive overtones of NIR absorptions represent identical chemical information. It is therefore possible to rearrange these overtone regions of the vectors comprising an IR and NIR spectrum into a matrix where the fundamental, 1st, 2nd, and consecutive overtones of the spectrum are arranged as either rows or columns in a matrix, resulting in a true three-way tensor of data for several samples. This tensorization facilitates explorative analysis and modelling with multi-way methods, for example parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC), N-way partial least squares (N-PLS), and Tucker models. The vibrational overtone combination spectroscopy (VOCSY) arrangement is shown to benefit from the "order advantage", producing more robust, stable, and interpretable models than, for example, the traditional PLS modelling method. The proposed method also opens the field of NIR for true peak decomposition--a feature unique to the method because the latent factors acquired using PARAFAC can represent pure spectral components whereas latent factors in principal component analysis (PCA) and PLS usually do not.