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 für 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.
