A novel spectra similarity measure

A new method is described for calculating the similarity degree of two spectra. Its performance is optimized with similar, computer-generated 1H NMR spectra. The method is compared with a recently proposed local cross-correlation method. Using a test set, its power to discriminate between related and unrelated 1H NMR spectra is better than with the cross-correlation method. Better results are also obtained when comparing measured spectra of a database with the corresponding estimated ones or with estimated spectra of randomly assigned structures. Although, so far, it has only been tested with 1H NMR spectra, due to the generality of the approach, the novel procedure can be applied to comparing other spectra or patterns as well.