To demonstrate the effects of noise on decomposition of absorbance signals into concentrations, we calculated the ratio of two components found when 5 μM of each component was converted to absorbance signal using the indicated extinction-coefficient matrices (E, indicated in panel) using Eq. 8. Synthetic, normally distributed noise with a standard deviation of 0.003 was added, and the process reversed to produce concentrations again. These concentrations were converted to an A-over-B ratio. Shown are histograms of results when the process was repeated 10,000 times each for the two different E matrices. The histograms were normalized to give an area of 1.