Analysis of synchrotron radiation induced X-ray emission spectra with R environment

Author-Highlights
• Solution for spectral data processing and analysis based on open source R environment.
• Multivariate statistical analysis successfully implemented on spectral data.
• Automatic clustering of the data based on spectral differences by means of hierarchical cluster analysis.

Life sciences have seen a huge increase in the amount and complexity of data being collected with every experiment. Scientists today are faced with increasingly difficult task to extract vital information from the vast amount of numbers. Software used for this purpose should be sufficiently powerful and flexible to handle large and complex data sets. On the other hand it should allow the user to exactly follow what is being calculated, black-box type of software should be avoided. R platform (R Development Core Team, 2011), open-source environment for statistical analysis nicely fits these requirements. With its rapidly expanding user community it is quickly becoming the most important tool in statistical analysis of data in broad range of applications. The most important feature of R is the package system, allowing users to address specific problems with dedicated package and even for more advanced users to contribute software for their own fields. In this paper multivariate analysis and data treatment of spectral data by using R environment is presented.