Classification Data Analysis And Data Highways

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.

The volume presents innovations in data analysis and classification and gives an overview of the state of the art in these scientific fields and applications. Areas that receive considerable attention in the book are discrimination and clustering, data analysis and statistics, as well as applications in marketing, finance, and medicine. The reader will find material on recent technical and methodological developments and a large number of applications demonstrating the usefulness of the newly developed techniques.

This book presents new developments in data analysis, classification and multivariate statistics, and in their algorithmic implementation. The volume offers contributions to the theory of clustering and discrimination, multidimensional data analysis, data mining, and robust statistics with a special emphasis on the novel Forward Search approach. Many papers provide significant insight in a wide range of fields of application. Customer satisfaction and service evaluation are two examples of such emerging fields.

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 contains revised versions of selected papers presented during the biannual meeting of the Classification and Data Analysis Group of SocietA Italiana di Statistica, which was held in Bologna, September 22-24, 2003. The scientific program of the conference included 80 contributed papers. Moreover it was possible to recruit six internationally renowned invited spe- ers for plenary talks on their current research works regarding the core topics of IFCS (the International Federation of Classification Societies) and Wo- gang Gaul and the colleagues of the GfKl organized a session. Thus, the conference provided a large number of scientists and experts from home and abroad with an attractive forum for discussions and mutual exchange of knowledge. The talks in the different sessions focused on methodological developments in supervised and unsupervised classification and in data analysis, also p- viding relevant contributions in the context of applications. This suggested the presentation of the 43 selected papers in three parts as follows: CLASSIFICATION AND CLUSTERING Non parametric classification Clustering and dissimilarities MULTIVARIATE STATISTICS AND DATA ANALYSIS APPLIED MULTIVARIATE STATISTICS Environmental data Microarray data Behavioural and text data Financial data We wish to express our gratitude to the authors whose enthusiastic p- ticipation made the meeting possible. We are very grateful to the reviewers for the time spent in their professional reviewing work. We would also like to extend our thanks to the chairpersons and discussants of the sessions: their comments and suggestions proved very stimulating both for the authors and the audience.

International Federation of Classification Societies The International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) is an agency for the dissemination of technical and scientific information concerning classification and data analysis in the broad sense and in as wide a· range of applications as possible; founded in 1985 in Cambridge (UK) from the following Scientific Societies and Groups: British Classification Society -BCS; Classification Society of North America -CSNA; Gesellschaft fUr Klassifikation -GfKl; Japanese Classification Society -JCS; Classification Group of Italian Statistical Society - COSIS; Societe Francophone de Classification -SFC. Now the IFCS includes the following Societies: Dutch-Belgian Classification Society - VOC; Polish Classification Section - SKAD; Portuguese Classification Association - CLAD; Group-at-Large; Korean Classification Society -KCS. Biannual Meeting of the Classification and Data Analysis Group of SIS The biannual meeting of the Classification and Data Analysis Group of Societa Italiana di Statistica (SIS) was held in Pescara, July 3 -4, 1997. The 69 papers presented were divided in 17 sessions. Each session was organized by a chairperson with two invited speakers and two contributed papers from a call for papers. All the works were referred. Furthermore, during the meeting a discussant was provided for each session. A short version of the papers (4 pages) was.published before the conference.