This volume contains selected papers covering a wide range of topics, including theoretical and methodological advances relating to data gathering, classification and clustering, exploratory and multivariate data analysis, and knowledge seeking and discovery. The result is a broad view of the state of the art, making this an essential work not only for data analysts, mathematicians, and statisticians, but also for researchers involved in data processing at all stages from data gathering to decision making.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Seven~h Confer ence of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS-2000), which was held in Namur, Belgium, July 11-14,2000. From the originally sub mitted papers, a careful review process involving two reviewers per paper, led to the selection of 65 papers that were considered suitable for publication in this book. The present book contains original research contributions, innovative ap plications and overview papers in various fields within data analysis, classifi cation, and related methods. Given the fast publication process, the research results are still up-to-date and coincide with their actual presentation at the IFCS-2000 conference. The topics captured are: • Cluster analysis • Comparison of clusterings • Fuzzy clustering • Discriminant analysis • Mixture models • Analysis of relationships data • Symbolic data analysis • Regression trees • Data mining and neural networks • Pattern recognition • Multivariate data analysis • Robust data analysis • Data science and sampling The IFCS (International Federation of Classification Societies) The IFCS promotes the dissemination of technical and scientific information data analysis, classification, related methods, and their applica concerning tions.

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.

This volume contains selected papers covering a wide range of topics, including theoretical and methodological advances relating to data gathering, classification and clustering, exploratory and multivariate data analysis, and knowledge seeking and discovery. The result is a broad view of the state of the art, making this an essential work not only for data analysts, mathematicians, and statisticians, but also for researchers involved in data processing at all stages from data gathering to decision making.

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.

Focuses on mathematical understanding Presentation is self-contained, accessible, and comprehensive Full color throughout Extensive list of exercises and worked-out examples Many concrete algorithms with actual code