A new approach for determination of component number in chemical system: Subspace comparison

A new approach is proposed to determine component number in mixture. In this procedure, base vectors of measurement matrix are extracted by two methods respectivety. The discrepancy between subspaces spanned by two sets of base vectors is measured. Examples in this note show that the proposed procedure can correctly determine the number of components for systems even with very similar spectral profiles. It is applied in the study of the setf-association behavior of alcohol in CCI4.