The analysis of cyclical macroeconomic phenomena is an important field of econometric research. In the recent past, research interests have de-emphasized quantitative forecasting exercises and have addressed the qualitative diagnosis of the relative stance of the economy regarding »upswing«, »recession«, or »boom« periods, i. e. the classification of the state of the economy into a limited number of discrete states. In this context the principal challenge is to reduce the multifaceted and sometimes abundant quantitative information about the business cycle to such qualitative statements in an efficient way. For more than six years this task was the focus of the project »Multivariate determination and analysis of business cycles« within the SFB 475 »Reduction of complexity in multivariate data structures«, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The necessity for complexity reduction is, of course, not unique to business cycle analysis but is studied in many fields and in a number of ways. This broad interest in the reduction of problem dimensionality and in the appropriate combination of data and of theory caused the RWI Essen and the Statistical Department of the University of Dortmund in January 2002 to hold a workshop at the RWI Essen where the findings of this and similar projects were presented and discussed. The present publication collects revised versions of the papers presented at this workshop. Although the workshop took place some five years ago, these papers mark an importent juncture in the development of business cycle research.

This volume presents a selection of research papers on various topics at the interface of statistics and computer science. Emphasis is put on the practical applications of statistical methods in various disciplines, using machine learning and other computational methods. The book covers fields of research including the design of experiments, computational statistics, music data analysis, statistical process control, biometrics, industrial engineering, and econometrics. Gathering innovative, high-quality and scientifically relevant contributions, the volume was published in honor of Claus Weihs, Professor of Computational Statistics at TU Dortmund University, on the occasion of his 66th birthday.

It is a great privilege and pleasure to write a foreword for a book honor ing Wolfgang Gaul on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Wolfgang Gaul is currently Professor of Business Administration and Management Science and the Head of the Institute of Decision Theory and Management Science, Faculty of Economics, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany. He is, by any measure, one of the most distinguished and eminent scholars in the world today. Wolfgang Gaul has been instrumental in numerous leading research initia tives and has achieved an unprecedented level of success in facilitating com munication among researchers in diverse disciplines from around the world. A particularly remarkable and unique aspect of his work is that he has been a leading scholar in such diverse areas of research as graph theory and net work models, reliability theory, stochastic optimization, operations research, probability theory, sampling theory, cluster analysis, scaling and multivariate data analysis. His activities have been directed not only at these and other theoretical topics, but also at applications of statistical and mathematical tools to a multitude of important problems in computer science (e.g., w- mining), business research (e.g., market segmentation), management science (e.g., decision support systems) and behavioral sciences (e.g., preference mea surement and data mining). All of his endeavors have been accomplished at the highest level of professional excellence.

Nowadays, single companies are confronted with great difficulties. The progress of the information technology and the distribution of the Internet as well as the changing demand of customers, especially for no-standardised products force them to react immediately.In order to solve these problems, the companies should work on the following aspects:How can they reach the state of flexibility to meet the changing demand? How can they compete within a market with increasing innovations of products and decreasing product life-cycl? How can they acquire the necessary capital, technology and know-how to compete? How is it possible to optimise their corporate structures and achieve synergetic effects?

Britain is confronted with the EU and its Economic and Monetary Union or the 'eurozone' an area of 12 EU Member States in which the Euro is the single currency. At a time in which the discussion revolves around the future of national currencies, this work looks at the question of monetary integration for the cases of Britain and Canada.

This volume contains revised versions of selected papers presented dur ing the 23rd Annual Conference of the German Classification Society GfKl (Gesellschaft fiir Klassifikation). The conference took place at the Univer sity of Bielefeld (Germany) in March 1999 under the title "Classification and Information Processing at the Turn of the Millennium". Researchers and practitioners - interested in data analysis, classification, and information processing in the broad sense, including computer science, multimedia, WWW, knowledge discovery, and data mining as well as spe cial application areas such as (in alphabetical order) biology, finance, genome analysis, marketing, medicine, public health, and text analysis - had the op portunity to discuss recent developments and to establish cross-disciplinary cooperation in their fields of interest. Additionally, software and book pre sentations as well as several tutorial courses were organized. The scientific program of the conference included 18 plenary or semi plenary lectures and more than 100 presentations in special sections. The peer-reviewed papers are presented in 5 chapters as follows: • Data Analysis and Classification • Computer Science, Computational Statistics, and Data Mining • Management Science, Marketing, and Finance • Biology, Genome Analysis, and Medicine • Text Analysis and Information Retrieval As an unambiguous assignment of results to single chapters is sometimes difficult papers are grouped in a way that the editors found appropriate.

This book gathers research and best-practices concerning the achievement of sustainable development goals in both community generation and business growth. It highlights the organizational aspects relating to the realization of green innovation. It covers models for optimizing the use of both natural and human resources. It reports on assessment methods and advanced models to analyze community and business performance in the context of sustainable development. Further, it proposes solutions to reduce the effects of environmental pollution, increase energy efficiency, and managing resources and waste, to foster sustainable development. Gathering the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Sustainable, Circular Management and Environmental Engineering (ISCMEE 2022), held on October 19-20, 2022, as a hybrid event from İzmir, Turkey, this book offers a timely snapshot on circular business management knowledge and methods for both researchers and professionals in the field of engineering management, business and economics, and energy and environment.