I am very happy to have this opportunity to present the work of Boris Mirkin, a distinguished Russian scholar in the areas of data analysis and decision making methodologies. The monograph is devoted entirely to clustering, a discipline dispersed through many theoretical and application areas, from mathematical statistics and combina torial optimization to biology, sociology and organizational structures. It compiles an immense amount of research done to date, including many original Russian de velopments never presented to the international community before (for instance, cluster-by-cluster versions of the K-Means method in Chapter 4 or uniform par titioning in Chapter 5). The author's approach, approximation clustering, allows him both to systematize a great part of the discipline and to develop many in novative methods in the framework of optimization problems. The optimization methods considered are proved to be meaningful in the contexts of data analysis and clustering. The material presented in this book is quite interesting and stimulating in paradigms, clustering and optimization. On the other hand, it has a substantial application appeal. The book will be useful both to specialists and students in the fields of data analysis and clustering as well as in biology, psychology, economics, marketing research, artificial intelligence, and other scientific disciplines. Panos Pardalos, Series Editor.

Data clustering, also known as cluster analysis, is an unsupervised process that divides a set of objects into homogeneous groups. Since the publication of the first edition of this monograph in 2007, development in the area has exploded, especially in clustering algorithms for big data and open-source software for cluster analysis. This second edition reflects these new developments, covers the basics of data clustering, includes a list of popular clustering algorithms, and provides program code that helps users implement clustering algorithms. Data Clustering: Theory, Algorithms and Applications, Second Edition will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and data scientists as well as undergraduate and graduate students.

Cluster analysis finds groups in data automatically. Most methods have been heuristic and leave open such central questions as: how many clusters are there? Which method should I use? How should I handle outliers? Classification assigns new observations to groups given previously classified observations, and also has open questions about parameter tuning, robustness and uncertainty assessment. This book frames cluster analysis and classification in terms of statistical models, thus yielding principled estimation, testing and prediction methods, and sound answers to the central questions. It builds the basic ideas in an accessible but rigorous way, with extensive data examples and R code; describes modern approaches to high-dimensional data and networks; and explains such recent advances as Bayesian regularization, non-Gaussian model-based clustering, cluster merging, variable selection, semi-supervised and robust classification, clustering of functional data, text and images, and co-clustering. Written for advanced undergraduates in data science, as well as researchers and practitioners, it assumes basic knowledge of multivariate calculus, linear algebra, probability and statistics.

At a moderately advanced level, this book seeks to cover the areas of clustering and related methods of data analysis where major advances are being made. Topics include: hierarchical clustering, variable selection and weighting, additive trees and other network models, relevance of neural network models to clustering, the role of computational complexity in cluster analysis, latent class approaches to cluster analysis, theory and method with applications of a hierarchical classes model in psychology and psychopathology, combinatorial data analysis, clusterwise aggregation of relations, review of the Japanese-language results on clustering, review of the Russian-language results on clustering and multidimensional scaling, practical advances, and significance tests.

This volume presents 43 articles dealing with models and methods of data analysis and classification, statistics and stochastics, information systems and WWW- and Internet-related topics as well as many applications. These articles are selected from more than 100 papers presented at the 21st Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation. Based on the submitted and revised papers six sections have been arranged: - Classification and Data Analysis - Mathematical and Statistical Methods - World Wide Web and the Internet - Speech and Pattern Recognition - Marketing.

This textbook provides a solid mathematical basis for understanding popular data science algorithms for clustering and classification and shows that an in-depth understanding of the mathematics powering these algorithms gives insight into the underlying data. It presents a step-by-step derivation of these algorithms, outlining their implementation from scratch in a computationally sound way. Mathematics of Data Science: A Computational Approach to Clustering and Classification proposes different ways of visualizing high-dimensional data to unveil hidden internal structures, and nearly every chapter includes graphical explanations and computed examples using publicly available data sets to highlight similarities and differences among the algorithms. This self-contained book is geared toward advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in the mathematical sciences, engineering, and computer science and can be used as the main text in a semester course. Researchers in any application area where data science methods are used will also find the book of interest. No advanced mathematical or statistical background is assumed.

Advances in experimental methods have resulted in the generation of enormous volumes of data across the life sciences. Hence clustering and classification techniques that were once predominantly the domain of ecologists are now being used more widely. This 2006 book provides an overview of these important data analysis methods, from long-established statistical methods to more recent machine learning techniques. It aims to provide a framework that will enable the reader to recognise the assumptions and constraints that are implicit in all such techniques. Important generic issues are discussed first and then the major families of algorithms are described. Throughout the focus is on explanation and understanding and readers are directed to other resources that provide additional mathematical rigour when it is required. Examples taken from across the whole of biology, including bioinformatics, are provided throughout the book to illustrate the key concepts and each technique's potential.