consistency_error: Consistency error of a tracer selection for an apportionment...

In OceanTracer: Marine Source Unmixing Toolkit

Consistency error of a tracer selection for an apportionment solution

Description

Assesses the mathematical consistency of a tracer selection by computing the normalized error between the predicted and observed tracer concentrations in the mixture. A low error (typically below 0.05) for all tracers indicates a consistent selection. High errors point to non-conservative tracers or multiple partial solutions in the dataset.

Usage

consistency_error(data, solution)

CTS_error(data, solution)

cts_error(data, solution)

Arguments

data	A data frame containing the characteristics of sediment sources and one mixture, in the standard fingerprinting format.
solution	Either a numeric vector of apportionment weights (one per source, in the same order as they appear in data), or a single-row data frame with columns named w1, w2, ... as returned by the unmixing functions.

Details

The error for each tracer is the absolute difference between the observed mixture concentration and the virtual mixture reconstructed from the apportionment solution, after normalizing by the range of the source confidence intervals.

Value

A data frame with columns tracer and consistency_error, one row per tracer.

References

Latorre, B., Lizaga, I., Gaspar, L., & Navas, A. (2021). A novel method for analysing consistency and unravelling multiple solutions in sediment fingerprinting. Science of The Total Environment, 789, 147804.

OceanTracer documentation built on Oct. 15, 2026, 5:09 p.m.