Comprehensive data analysis of femtosecond transient absorption spectra: A review

Nowadays, time-resolved spectroscopy data can be routinely and accurately collected in UV-vis femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy. However, the data analysis strategy and the postulation of a physically valid model for this kind of measurements may be tackled with many different approaches ranging from pure soft-modeling (model-free) to hard-modeling, where the elaboration of a parametric spectro-temporal model may be required. This paper reviews methods that are used in practice for the analysis of femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy data. Model-based methods, common in photochemistry, are revisited, and soft-modeling methods, which originate from the chemometrics field and that recently disseminated in the photo(bio)chemistry literature, are presented. These soft-modeling methods are designed to suit the intrinsic nature of the multivariate (or multi-way) measurement. Soft-modeling tools do not require a priori physical or mechanistic models to provide a decomposition of the data on the time and wavelength dimensions, the only requirement being that these two (or more) dimensions are separable. Additionally, Bayesian data analysis, which provides a probabilistic framework for data analysis, is considered in detail, since it allows uncertainty quantification and validation of the model selection step. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.