Introduction-Electronic nose (E-nose) is a technology that can provide a specific and holistic odor fingerprint of a Chinese medicinal herb (CMH).Based on this kind of odor fingerprint,E-nose could be applied to identify CMHs according to their unique odor.Objective-To introduce a new method using E-nose and mathematics modeling method to CMHs identification, provide modern understanding of traditional identification experience from Chinese practioner.Material and methods-In this paper, eight different herbs from Asteraceae were purchased and Enose was applied to obtain their odor fingerprints.Meanwhile, partial least-squares (PLS) was used to establish a mathematics model to identify different samples from Asteraceae family based on their odor fingerprints.Results-The method proposed in this paper can be used to distinguish eight kinds of CMHs from Asteraceae famiy.Conclusion-It appeared that different kinds of herbs from Asterazeae family with different odors can be correctly classified by E-nose combined with PLS, which provides a simple, fast and effective method for identification of Asteraceae herbs.This paper also gives insights to further studies, for instance, applying other kinds of mathematics modeling method like artificial neural network, to improve the discriminative model.