“…Although a number of sophisticated classification methods exist, some allowing estimates of the probability of class membership and the possibility of dual group membership (Frank & Friedman, 1989;Frank & Lanteri, 1989;Lavine, 2000a), a simple implementation of discriminant analysis (DA) is applied here, based upon partial least-squares regression (PLS), a multivariate regression technique widely used in the chemical sciences (Kemsley, 1996;Lavine, 2000b;Wold & Josephson, 2000). In PLS, a set of descriptor variables, X , is related to a set of response variables, Y , using a series of least-squares fitting steps.…”