Chemometrics in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a new type of elemental analytical technology with the advantages of real-time, online, and noncontact as well as enabling the simultaneous analysis of multiple elements. It has become a frontier analytical technique in spectral analysis. However, the issue of how to improve the accuracy of qualitative and quantitative analyses by extracting useful information from a large amount of complex LIBS data remains the main problem for the LIBS technique. Chemometrics is a chemical subdiscipline of multi-interdisciplinary methods; it offers advantages in data processing, signal analysis, and pattern recognition. It can solve some complicated problems that are difficult for traditional chemical methods. In this paper, we reviewed the research progress of chemometrics methods in LIBS for spectral data preprocessing as well as for qualitative and quantitative analyses in the most recent 5 years (2012-2016).