Joint cluster and non-negative least squares analysis for aerosol mass spectrum data

Aerosol mass spectrum (AMS) data contain hundreds of mass to charge ratios and their corresponding intensities from air collected through the mass spectrometer. The observations are usually taken sequentially in time to monitor the air composition, quality and temporal change in an area of interest. An important goal of AMS data analysis is to reduce the dimensionality of the original data yielding a small set of representing tracers for various atmospheric and climatic models. In this work, we present an approach to jointly apply the cluster analysis and the non-negative least squares method towards this goal. Application to a relevant study demonstrates the effectiveness of this new approach. Comparisons are made to other relevant multivariate statistical techniques including the principal component analysis and the positive matrix factorization method, and guidelines are provided.