Chemometrics is the science of extracting information from chemical systems by data-driven means. Chemometrics is inherently interdisciplinary, using methods frequently employed in core data-analytic disciplines such as multivariate statistics, applied mathematics, and computer science, in order to address problems in chemistry, biochemistry, medicine, biology and chemical engineering. In this way, it mirrors other interdisciplinary fields, such as psychometrics and econometrics. Background Chemometrics is applied to solve both descriptive and predictive problems in experimental natural sciences, especially in chemistry. In descriptive applications, properties of chemical systems are modeled with the intent of learning the underlying relationships and structure of the system (i.e., model understanding and identification). In predictive applications, properties of chemical systems are modeled with the intent of predicting new properties or behavior of interest. In both cases, the datasets can be small but are often large and complex, involving hundreds to thousands of variables, and hundreds to thousands of cases or observations. Chemometric techniques are particularly heavily used in analytical chemistry and metabolomics, and the development of improved chemometric methods of analysis also continues to advance the state of the art in analytical instrumentation and methodology. It is an application-driven discipline, and thus while the standard chemometric methodologies are very widely used industrially, academic groups are dedicated to the continued development of chemometric theory, method and application development. Origins Although one could argue that even the earliest analytical experiments in chemistry involved a form of chemometrics, the field is generally recognized to have emerged in the 1970s as computers became increasingly exploited for scientific investigation. The term 'chemometrics' was coined by Svante Wold in a 1971 grant application, and the International Chemometrics Society was formed shortly thereafter by Svante Wold and Bruce Kowalski, two pioneers in the field. Wold was a professor of organic chemistry at Umeå University, Sweden, and Kowalski was a professor of analytical chemistry at University of Washington, Seattle. Many early applications involved multivariate classification, numerous quantitative predictive applications followed, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s a wide variety of data- and computer-driven chemical analyses were occurring. Multivariate analysis was a critical facet even in the earliest applications of chemometrics. Data from infrared and UV/visible spectroscopy are often counted in thousands of measurements per sample. Mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance, atomic emission/absorption and chromatography experiments are also all by nature highly multivariate. The structure of these data was found to be conducive to using