TESTING FOR REDUNDANCY IN PRODUCT QUALITY CONTROL TEST CRITERIA:AN APPLICATION TO AVIATION TURBINE FUEL

Given a set of test criteria that determine a quality specification,the question often arises whether anyof the tests are redundant because of intercorrelations.Simple selection of tests on the basis of partialcorrelations with the other tests is rejected on the basis that the random error in the data may be causingspurious correlations.One method is to use cross-validation to define the systematic principal components and examine thecorrelation structure in this reduced space.It is shown that the presence of principal componentsdominated by individual tests(‘variable specific’PCs),which are indicated by cross-validation as beingnon-systematic,must be taken into account.Having defined the dimensionality,a variable reductionmethod based on Procrustes rotation selects subsets of tests that preserve the structure of the samples inmultivariate space.This is an attractive proposition in the context of maintaining a quality controlspecification.It is also shown that the variable reduction technique can be used to aid the identificationof the true dimensionality of the data space.This approach is applied to a number of routine tests carriedout on aviation turbine fuel.