A new strategy based on PCA for inter-batches quality consistency evaluation

Due to cultivation position, climate, harvest times, storage conditions and processing method, the evaluation of intra- and inter- batches quality consistency of botanical drugs has always been a thorny problem since it concerns safety and efficacy. The combination of fingerprint based on instrumental analysis and chemometrics is a common evaluation method in recent years. The differences between groups can be judged intuitively and superficially through principal component analysis (PCA) multi-dimensional score plots, but there is a lack of scientific and quantitative index to quantify the differences between groups. How to quantify the difference between groups is basically a blank area of research. Based on traditional F-statistic, we proposed a new F