A volume in the Data Handling in Science and Technology series, A Chemometrics Guide for Chromatographers helps bring chemometrics and statistics to the chromatographic field, with the aim of making the statistical tools understandable and useful for this community. There are excellent textbooks about chemometrics and chromatography available on the market, but none of them are devoted solely to bringing both fields together in a simple language. The nature of the data arising from chromatography deserves special attention (e.g., data alignment, hyphenation or two-dimensional chromatography). In the coming years, chromatography will have to deal with ever more complex samples and obtain more information out of them in a relatively short time-scale. However, we are unable to solve everything with chromatography alone, and for this reason chemometrics will be used more and more to convert data derived from these methods. Over recent decades, chemometricians have been busy developing algorithms and smart statistical techniques to solve the previous question: (i) to optimise analytical instruments and (ii) to extract the maximum information out of the data generated by the instruments.

It is no longer possible for separation scientists and chemometricians to work in isolation, as both spheres of knowledge must go hand-in-hand.