In our example, these aspects can be discerned when comparing the most parsimonious solution in Fig. 1d from Tikhonov regularization with the spiky exact solution in Fig. 1c , or with the incorrect solution in Fig. 5c from one iteration adapted from the Demeler scheme. Even though the spiky solutions suggest very few and discrete species to be in solution, the smooth Tikhonov solution fits the data indistinguishably well from the exact best-fit solution. Its nearly featureless appearance in the f r -dimension highlights simply the lack of sufficient information in the raw data in order to determine the f r -values well.