Quantitative analysis of volatile organic compounds using ion mobility spectra and cascade correlation neural networks

Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS) is a powerful technique for trace organic analysis in the gas phase. Quantitative measurements are difficult, because IMS has a limited linear range. Factors that may affect the instrument response are pressure, temperature, and humidity. Nonlinear calibration methods, such as neural networks, may be ideally suited for IMS. Neural networks have the capability of modeling complex systems. Many neural networks suffer from long training times and overfitting. Cascade correlation neural networks train at very fast rates. They also build their own topology, that is a number of layers and number of units in each layer. By controlling the decay parameter in training neural networks, reproducible and general models may be obtained