In science, industry, public administration and documentation centers large amounts of data and information are collected which must be analyzed, ordered, visualized, classified and stored efficiently in order to be useful for practical applications. This volume contains 50 selected theoretical and applied papers presenting a wealth of new and innovative ideas, methods, models and systems which can be used for this purpose. It combines papers and strategies from two main streams of research in an interdisciplinary, dynamic and exciting way: On the one hand, mathematical and statistical methods are described which allow a quantitative analysis of data, provide strategies for classifying objects or making exploratory searches for interesting structures, and give ways to make comprehensive graphical displays of large arrays of data. On the other hand, papers related to information sciences, informatics and data bank systems provide powerful tools for representing, modelling, storing and retrieving facts, data and knowledge characterized by qualitative descriptors, semantic relations, or linguistic concepts. The integration of both fields and a special part on applied problems from biology, medicine, archeology, industry and administration assure that this volume will be informative and useful for theory and practice.

The subject of this book is the analysis and processing of structural or quantitative data with emphasis on classification methods, new algorithms as well as applications in various fields related to data analysis and classification. The book presents the state of the art in world-wide research and application of methods from the fields indicated above and consists of survey papers as well as research papers.

​​​​​​​​​This volume contains both methodological papers showing new original methods, and papers on applications illustrating how new domain-specific knowledge can be made available from data by clever use of data analysis methods. The volume is subdivided in three parts: Classification and Data Analysis; Data Mining; and Applications. The selection of peer reviewed papers had been presented at a meeting of classification societies held in Florence, Italy, in the area of "Classification and Data Mining".​

This volume provides approaches and solutions to challenges occurring at the interface of research fields such as, e.g., data analysis, data mining and knowledge discovery, computer science, operations research, and statistics. In addition to theory-oriented contributions various application areas are included. Moreover, traditional classification research directions concerning network data, graphs, and social relationships as well as statistical musicology describe examples for current interest fields tackled by the authors. The book comprises a total of 55 selected papers presented at the Joint Conference of the German Classification Society (GfKl), the German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM), and the Symposium of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) in 2011.​

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.

The book presents a long list of useful methods for classification, clustering and data analysis. By combining theoretical aspects with practical problems, it is designed for researchers as well as for applied statisticians and will support the fast transfer of new methodological advances to a wide range of applications.

This volume describes new methods with special emphasis on classification and cluster analysis. These methods are applied to problems in information retrieval, phylogeny, medical diagnosis, microarrays, and other active research areas.