Test of the Latent Dimension of a Spatial Blind Source Separation Model

We assume a spatial blind source separation model in which the observed multivariate spatial data is a linear mixture of latent spatially uncorrelated Gaussian random fields containing a number of pure white noise components. We propose a test on the number of white noise components and obtain the asymptotic distribution of its statistic for a general domain. We also demonstrate how computations can be facilitated in the case of gridded observation locations. Based on this test, we obtain a consistent estimator of the true dimension. Simulation studies and an environmental application demonstrate that our test is at least comparable to and often outperforms bootstrap-based techniques, which are also introduced in this paper.