Structure-Preserving Joint Non-negative Tensor Factorization to Identify Reaction Pathways Using Bayesian Networks.

Extracting meaningful information from spectroscopic data is key to species identification as a first step to monitoring chemical reactions in unknown complex mixtures. Spectroscopic data obtained over multiple process modes (temperature, residence time) from different sensors [Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR)] comprise hidden complementary information of the underlying chemical system. This work proposes an approach to jointly capture these hidden patterns in a structure-preserving and interpretable manner using coupled non-negative tensor factorization to achieve uniqueness in decomposition. Projections onto the modes of spectral channels, specific to each sensor, are interpreted as pseudo-component spectra, while projections onto the shared process modes are interpreted as the corresponding pseudo-component concentrations across temperature and residence times. Causal structure inference among these pseudo-component spectra (using Bayesian networks) is then used to identify plausible reaction pathways among the identified species representing each pseudo-component. Tensor decomposition of the FTIR data enables the development of reaction sequences based on the identified functional groups, while that of 1H NMR by itself is lacking in mechanism development as it solely reveals the proton environments in a pseudo-component. However, jointly parsing spectra from both the sensors is seen to capture complementary information, wherein insights into the proton environment from 1H NMR disambiguate pseudo-components that have similar FTIR peaks. A scalable method of parallelizing tensor decomposition to handle high-dimensional modes in process data by using grid tensor factorization, while being robust to process data artifacts like outliers, noise, and missing data, has been developed.