ConsultGLP

Replication and successive dilution in constructing calibration curve

An analytical instrument generally needs to be calibrated before measurements made on prepared sample solutions, through construction of a linear regression between the analytical responses and the concentrations of the standard analyte solutions. A linear regression is favored over quadratic or exponential curve as it incurs minimum error.   

Replication

Replication in standard calibration is found to be useful if replicates are genuinely independent. The calibration precision is improved by increasing the number of replicates, n, and provides additional checks on the calibration solution preparation and on the precision of different concentrations.

The trend of its precision can be read from the variance of these calibration points. A calibration curve might be found to have roughly constant standard deviations in all these plotted points, whilst others may show a proportional increase in standard deviation in line with the increase of analyte concentration. The former behavior is known as “homoscedasticity” and the latter, “heteroscedasticity”.  

It may be noted that increasing the number of independent concentration points has actually little benefit after a certain extent. In fact, after having six calibration points, it can be shown that any further increase in the number of observations in calibration has relatively modest effect on the standard error of prediction for a predicted x value unless such number of points increases very substantially, say to 30 which of course is not practical.

Instead, independent replication at each calibration point can be recommended as a method of improving uncertainties. Indeed, independent replication is accordingly a viable method of increasing n when the best performance is desired. 

However, replication suffers from an important drawback. Many analysts incline to simply injecting a calibration standard solution twice, instead of preparing duplicate standard solutions separately for the injection. By injecting the same standard solution twice into the analytical instrument, the plotted residuals will appear in close pairs but are clearly not independent. This is essentially useless for improving precision. Worse, it artificially increases the number of freedom for simple linear regression, giving a misleading small prediction interval.

Therefore ideally replicated observations should be entirely independent, using different stock calibration solutions if at all possible. Otherwise it is best to first examine replicated injections to check for outlying differences and then to calculate the calibration based on the mean value of y for each distinct concentration.

There is one side effect of replication that may be useful. If means of replicates are taken, the distribution of errors in the mean tend to be the normal distribution as the number of replicates increases, regardless of parent distribution. The distribution of the mean of as few as 3 replicates is very close to the normal distribution even with fairly extreme departure from normality.  Averaging three or more replicates can therefore provide more accurate statistical inference in critical cases where non-normality is suspected.

Successive dilutions

A common pattern of calibration that we usually practice is doing a serial dilution, resulting in logarithmically decreasing concentrations (for example, 16, 8, 4. 2 and 1 mg/L). This is simple and has the advantage of providing a high upper calibrated level, which may be useful in analyzing routine samples that occasionally show high values.

However, this layout has several disadvantages. First, errors in dilution are multiplied at each step, increasing the volume uncertainties, and perhaps worse, increasing the risk of any undetected gross dilution error (especially if the analyst commits the cardinal sin of using one of the calibration solutions as a QC sample as well!).

Second, the highest concentration point has high leverage, affecting both the gradient and y-intercept of the line plotted; errors at the high concentration will cause potentially large variation in results.

Thirdly, departure in linearity are easier to detect with fairly even spaced points.  In general, therefore, equally spaced calibration points across the range of interest should be much preferred.

In instrumental analysis, there must be a measurement model, an equation that relates the amounts to be measured to the instrument response such as absorbance, transmittance, peak areas, peak heights, potential current, etc.  From this model, we can then derive the calibration equation.

It is our usual practice to perform the experiment in such as a way as to fix influence standard concentration of the measurand and the instrument response in a simple linear relationship, i.e., 

y = a + bx                                                                   ………. [1]

where

y is the indication of the instrument (i.e., the instrument response),

x is the independent variable (i.e., mostly for our purpose, the concentration of the measurand)

and, 

a and b are the coefficients of the model, known as the intercept and slope (or gradient) of the curve, respectively.

Therefore, for a number of x_i values, we will have the corresponding instrument responses, y_i. We then fit the above model of equation to the data.

As usual, any particular instrumental measurement of y_i will be subject to measurement error (e_i), that is,

y_i = a + bx_i + e_i                                                                            …….. [2]

To get this linear model, we have to find a line that is best fit for the data points that we have obtained experimentally. We use the ordinary least square (OLS) approach, which chooses the model parameters that minimize the residual sum of squares (RSS) of the predicted y values versus the actual or experimental y values.  The residual (or sometimes called error), in this case, means the difference between the predicted y_i value derived from the above equation and the experimental y_i value.

So, if the linear equation model is correct, the sum of all the differences from all the points (x, y) on the plot should be arithmetically equal to zero.

It must be stressed however, that for the sake of the above statement to be true, we make an important assumption, i.e., the uncertainty of the independent variable, x_i, is very much less than in the instrument response, hence, only one error term e_i in y_i is considered due to this uncertainty which is sufficiently small to be neglected.  Such assumption is indeed valid for our laboratory analytical purposes and the estimation process of measurement error is then very much simplified.

What is another important assumption made in this OLS method? 

It is that the data are known to be homoscedastic, which means that the errors in y are assumed to be independent of the concentration.  In other words, the variance of y remains constant and does not change for each x_i value or for a range of x values.   This also means that all the points have equal weight when the slope and intercept of the line are calculated. The following plot illustrates this important point.

However, in many of our chemical analysis, this assumption is not likely to be valid.  In fact, many data are heteroscedastic, i.e. the standard deviation of the y-values increases with the concentration of the analyte, rather than having the constant value of variation at all concentrations. In other words, the errors that are approximately proportional to the analyte concentration. In fact, we find their relative standard deviations which are standard deviations divided by the mean values are roughly constant. The following plot illustrates this particular scenario.

In this case, the weighted regression method is to be applied. The regression line must be calculated to give additional weight to those points where the errors are smallest, i.e. it is important for the calculated line to pass close to such points than to pass close to the points representing higher concentrations with the largest errors.

This is achieved by giving each point a weighting inversely proportional to the corresponding y-direction variance, s_i².  Without going through details of its calculations which can be quite tedious and complex as compared with those of the unweighted ones, , it is suffice to say that in our case of instrumental calibration which normally sees the experimental points fit a straight line very well, we would find the slope (b) and y-intercept (a) of the weighted line are remarkably similar to those of the unweighted line, and the results of the two approaches give very similar values for the concentrations of samples within the linearity of the calibration line.

So, does it mean that one the face of it, the weighted regression calculations have little value to us?

The answer is a No.  

In addition to providing results very similar to those obtained from the simpler unweighted regression method, we find values in getting more realistic results on the estimation of the errors or confidence limits of those sample concentrations under study.  It can be shown by calculations that we will have narrower confidence limits at low concentrations in the weighted regression and its confidence limit increases with increasing instrumental signals, such as absorbance.  A general form of the confidence limits for a concentration determined using a weighted regression line is show in the sketch below:

These observations emphasize the particular importance of using weighted regression when the results of interest include those at low concentrations.  Similarly, detection limits may be more realistically assessed using the intercept and standard deviation obtained from a weighted regression graph.