A brief overview of the application of chemometrics in industry with an emphasis on sensors

The use of chemometrics has been applied as a statistical method merely to produce PCA or PLS regression, without consideration to the main issues, advantages, and disadvantages on the use of these methods. The combination and implementation of chemometrics and sensors relies on gathering data to generate new knowledge. The marriage of these techniques and associated instrumentation for analysis provides a platform to better understand different features of an environmental system. Understanding some of those features can be readily achieved using chemometrics. One of the intrinsic characteristics of these type of analysis is that the analyst should have the required basic knowledge of the processes and the system used to create the sample to complete the multidisciplinary work in environmental monitoring, using sensors, and applying the chemometrics. Ideal sampling systems are those that can be deployed in the environment and have the capacity to continuously monitor/ measure all the desired parameters [1]. When chemical and molecular targets are combined, unknown inferences can be made if the end-user is an expert in designing experiments or using data that proves the original hypothesis the scientist has designed. For example, a study using four contrasting sites were monitored during two consecutive seasons (summer and winter) in order to evaluate the feasibility of differentiating microbial communities from urban, rural, and industrial areas for the two seasons using air as the sample matrix [2]. Fortunately, some of these methods and applications are coming to light into research and development, and their translation into real applications or scenarios have been embraced by the industry, something we hope a galvanized marriage using chemometrics and sensors will achieve only through improved teaching and education.