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CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY Eleni Anthippi Chatzimichali ...

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The generated suite of tools, as presented throughout this thesis, has covered with<br />

equal emphasis a wide range of chemometric fields, including data aggregation,<br />

integration, analysis and visualisation. The software tools show the most promise in<br />

terms of performance, flexibility and simplicity. Exceptional attention and precision<br />

has been given to the application of rigorous validation and evaluation techniques as a<br />

means of generating as accurate, robust and unbiased models as possible; as stated in<br />

Brereton (2006) and Westerhuis et al. (2008), even though proper validation of<br />

machine learning models has received special attention over the past decade, it is<br />

most often lacking in the recent applications. Furthermore, a novelty of this research<br />

was the application of advanced optimisation techniques, which resulted in a striking<br />

speedup of the end-to-end analyses without however compromising the integrity of<br />

the validation and evaluation process; the minimisation of the computational cost and<br />

complexity was so impressive, it reached the point where all end-to-end analyses<br />

within the pipeline were executed within a few hours on a personal computer,<br />

obviating any need of a server or supercomputer. In addition, the analysis pipeline<br />

was built in the context of reproducible research in an extremely simple,<br />

straightforward and user-friendly way. The functionality of the implemented<br />

statistical tools can be further fused into a unified form of a single R package. The<br />

package can be uploaded on CRAN, the official R repository, where it will be freely<br />

available to others users. Having confirmed the generic nature and applicability of the<br />

developed tools by testing them on new real-world case studies, the package can be<br />

equally efficient when applied by other scientists to areas of inquiry far wider and<br />

more diverse than the present study. Finally, the package provides a great degree of<br />

extendibility, since it allows its users to conduct completely personalised analyses in<br />

addition to modifying and expanding its functionality.<br />

In summary, the project aims and objectives set out in Chapter 1 have been<br />

successfully met. In addition, the project has generated ideas for further work, which<br />

are explored in the following Section.<br />

198

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