Simultaneous spectrophotometric determination of Pb(II) and Cd(II) using artificial neural networks based on 4-(2-pyridylazo resorcinol)

A method for simultaneous analysis of Pb(II) and Cd(II) has been developed by using artificial neural network (ANN). This method is based on the difference concentration of Pb(II) and Cd(II) with 4-(2-pyridylazo resorcinol). A feed forward neural network using backpropagation (BP) algorithm has been employed in this study. The input layer consists of seven neurons, six neurons of hidden layer and two output neurons was found appropriate for the simultaneous determination of Pb(II) and Cd(II). The network was trained up to 20 epochs with 0.0001% learning rate. This reagent also provided good analytical performance with reproducibility characters of the method yield relative standard deviation (RSD) of 0.44% and 0.94% for Pb(II) and Cd(II), respectively. The limit of detection of the method was calculated to be 1.9 mg/L and 0.4 mg/L, respectively.