Patent ID: 7129095

Claim:
A method for analyzing an analyte, said method comprising: a) disposing a plurality of d sensors in an array, each sensor having a different response to said analyte: b) exposing said d sensors to said analyte to generate a response vector for said analyte; c) applying an importance index vector to said response vector to generate a weighted response vector; and d) comparing said weighted response vector to a weighted training set and thereafter selecting a match to identify said analyte, wherein said importance index vector is generated after a training mode conducted on said d sensors and before identification of said analyte, wherein said importance index vector is the collection of importance indices for each sensor and the weighted training set is generated by application of the importance index to each said response vector for each exposure to each of said plurality of known analytes in a training set, and wherein said importance index for a particular sensor is calculated from all the responses for that sensor in a training set as follows: S OverallWithinAnalytes 2 S OverallWithinAnalytes 2 wherein S 2 OverallAmongAnalytes is the overall variance among the analytes and S 2 Overall WithinAnalytes is the overall variance within the analytes.