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.

This book offers an original and broad exploration of the fundamental methods in Clustering and Combinatorial Data Analysis, presenting new formulations and ideas within this very active field. With extensive introductions, formal and mathematical developments and real case studies, this book provides readers with a deeper understanding of the mutual relationships between these methods, which are clearly expressed with respect to three facets: logical, combinatorial and statistical. Using relational mathematical representation, all types of data structures can be handled in precise and unified ways which the author highlights in three stages: Clustering a set of descriptive attributes Clustering a set of objects or a set of object categories Establishing correspondence between these two dual clusterings Tools for interpreting the reasons of a given cluster or clustering are also included. Foundations and Methods in Combinatorial and Statistical Data Analysis and Clustering will be a valuable resource for students and researchers who are interested in the areas of Data Analysis, Clustering, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.

Mr.Chitra Sabapathy Ranganathan, Associate Vice President, Mphasis Corporation, Arizona, USA

In the past several years, DNA microarray technology has attracted tremendous interest in both the scientific community and in industry. With its ability to simultaneously measure the activity and interactions of thousands of genes, this modern technology promises unprecedented new insights into mechanisms of living systems. Currently, the primary applications of microarrays include gene discovery, disease diagnosis and prognosis, drug discovery (pharmacogenomics), and toxicological research (toxicogenomics). Typical scientific tasks addressed by microarray experiments include the identification of coexpressed genes, discovery of sample or gene groups with similar expression patterns, identification of genes whose expression patterns are highly differentiating with respect to a set of discerned biological entities (e.g., tumor types), and the study of gene activity patterns under various stress conditions (e.g., chemical treatment). More recently, the discovery, modeling, and simulation of regulatory gene networks, and the mapping of expression data to metabolic pathways and chromosome locations have been added to the list of scientific tasks that are being tackled by microarray technology. Each scientific task corresponds to one or more so-called data analysis tasks. Different types of scientific questions require different sets of data analytical techniques. Broadly speaking, there are two classes of elementary data analysis tasks, predictive modeling and pattern-detection. Predictive modeling tasks are concerned with learning a classification or estimation function, whereas pattern-detection methods screen the available data for interesting, previously unknown regularities or relationships.

The contributions in this volume represent the latest research results in the field of Classification, Clustering, and Data Analysis. Besides the theoretical analysis, papers focus on various application fields as Archaeology, Astronomy, Bio-Sciences, Business, Electronic Data and Web, Finance and Insurance, Library Science and Linguistics, Marketing, Music Science, and Quality Assurance.

Covers everything readers need to know about clustering methodology for symbolic data—including new methods and headings—while providing a focus on multi-valued list data, interval data and histogram data This book presents all of the latest developments in the field of clustering methodology for symbolic data—paying special attention to the classification methodology for multi-valued list, interval-valued and histogram-valued data methodology, along with numerous worked examples. The book also offers an expansive discussion of data management techniques showing how to manage the large complex dataset into more manageable datasets ready for analyses. Filled with examples, tables, figures, and case studies, Clustering Methodology for Symbolic Data begins by offering chapters on data management, distance measures, general clustering techniques, partitioning, divisive clustering, and agglomerative and pyramid clustering. Provides new classification methodologies for histogram valued data reaching across many fields in data science Demonstrates how to manage a large complex dataset into manageable datasets ready for analysis Features very large contemporary datasets such as multi-valued list data, interval-valued data, and histogram-valued data Considers classification models by dynamical clustering Features a supporting website hosting relevant data sets Clustering Methodology for Symbolic Data will appeal to practitioners of symbolic data analysis, such as statisticians and economists within the public sectors. It will also be of interest to postgraduate students of, and researchers within, web mining, text mining and bioengineering.

The book presents a range of new developments in the theory and practice of multivariate statistical data analysis. Several contributions illustrate the use of multivariate methods in application fields such as economics, medicine, environment, and biology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, FSKD 2006, held in federation with the Second International Conference on Natural Computation ICNC 2006. The book presents 115 revised full papers and 50 revised short papers. Coverage includes neural computation, quantum computation, evolutionary computation, DNA computation, fuzzy computation, granular computation, artificial life, innovative applications to knowledge discovery, finance, operations research, and more.

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.