Reflectivity measurements are used in thin film investigations for determining the desity and the thickness of layered structures and the roughness of external and internal surfaces. From the mathematical point of view the deduction of these parameters from a measured reflectivity curve represents an inverSe ptoblem. At present, curve fitting procedures, based to a large extent on expert knowledge are commonly used in practice. These techniques suffer from a low degree of automation. In this paper we present a new approach to the evaluation of reflectivity measurements using support vector machines. For the estimation of the different thin film parameters we provide sparse approximations of vector-valued functions, where we work in parallel on the same data sets. Our support vector machines were trained by simulated reflectivity curves generated by the optical matrix method. The solution of the corresponding quadratic programming problem makes use of the SVMTorch algorithm. We present numerical investigations to assess the performance of our method using models of practical relevance. It is concluded that the approximation by support vector machines represents a very promising tool in X-ray reflectivity investigations and seems also to be applicable for a much broader range of parameter detection problems in X-ray analysis
