This book brings together a wide range of topics and perspectives in the growing field of Classification and related methods of Exploratory and Multivariate Data Analysis. It gives a broad view on the state ofthe art, useful for those in the scientific community who gather data and seek tools for analyzing and interpreting large sets of data. As it presents a wide field of applications, this book is not only of interest for data analysts, mathematicians and statisticians, but also for scientists from many areas and disciplines concerned with real data, e. g. , medicine, biology, astronomy, image analysis, pattern recognition, social sciences, psychology, marketing, etc. It contains 79 invited or selected and refereed papers presented during the Fourth Bi- ennial Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS'93) held in Paris. Previous conferences were held at Aachen (Germany), Charlottesville (USA) and Edinburgh (U. K. ).
The conference at Paris emerged from the elose coop- eration between the eight members of the IFCS: British Classification Society (BCS), Classification Society of North America (CSNA), Gesellschaft fur Klassifikation (GfKl), J apanese Classification Society (J CS), Jugoslovenska Sekcija za Klasifikacije (JSK), Societe Francophone de Classification (SFC), Societa. Italiana di Statistica (SIS), Vereniging voor Ordinatie en Classificatie (VOC), and was organized by INRIA ("Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique"), Rocquencourt and the "Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommuni- cations," Paris.