The present overview answers the need of assessing the current state of the art concerning the application of principal components analysis (PCA) to Raman spectroscopy investigations of cultural heritage and related materials. An increment of the employment of this multivariate statistic technique to Raman results in the mentioned field began between 15 and 10 years ago, after a very slow start at the turn of the millennium. A delay of about a decade was observed with respect to PCA applied to elemental quantitative data of archaeometric analyses, likely a consequence of the required spectral pre-treatment and to results of complex interpretation. Therefore, it is by now the time to summarize this evolution in a comprehensive, yet very specific way. In this overview, painting constituents were considered, both colouring materials and binders, in addition to natural and synthetic glasses, and biogenic and mineral gemmological materials. A marked unbalance between the studies pertaining to the different sections has been noticed, revealing a concentration of the work mainly on painting materials, including the study of ageing and alteration. The different aims of PCA application to Raman spectra, the various approaches and the achievable results, with the possible arising problems, were underlined, too. Special attention was given to the pre-treatment of the spectra, which was observed to be essential to overcome the influence of several issues concerning bands intensity, spectral noise, background, fluorescence and so on.

中文翻译：

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文化遗产材料拉曼研究中主成分分析方法概述

本概述满足了评估有关主成分分析 (PCA) 在文化遗产和相关材料的拉曼光谱研究中的应用的当前技术水平的需要。在世纪之交缓慢起步之后，上述领域的拉曼结果中这种多元统计技术的应用始于 15 至 10 年前。在将 PCA 应用于考古分析的元素定量数据方面，观察到大约十年的延迟，这可能是所需光谱预处理和复杂解释结果的结果。因此，现在是时候以全面而具体的方式总结这一演变了。在本概述中，除了天然和合成玻璃以及生物和矿物宝石材料之外，还考虑了绘画成分，包括着色材料和粘合剂。人们注意到不同部分的研究之间存在明显的不平衡，表明该作品主要集中在绘画材料上，包括老化和改变的研究。还强调了 PCA 应用拉曼光谱的不同目标、各种方法和可实现的结果以及可能出现的问题。特别关注光谱的预处理，这对于克服谱带强度、光谱噪声、背景、荧光等问题的影响至关重要。