This volume presents new developments in classification and mulitivariate analysis. Topics that have been treated with considerable attention are cluster analysis, discriminant analysis, proximity structure analysis, multidimensional scaling, genetic algorithms, neural networks, factorial methods, textual data analysis, regression models, non-parametric methods, and spatial and time series analysis. Readers will find new methodologies and algorithms in topics that are of central interest in modern statistics, with applications that demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed techniques.

Table of Contents:
I Classification and Multidimensional Scaling.- Cluster Analysis.- Galois Lattices of Modal Symbolic Objects.- Exploratory Methods for Detecting High Density Regions in Cluster Analysis.- A k-means Consensus Classification.- MIXISO: A Non-Hierarchical Clustering Method for Mixed-Mode Data.- “Stable Clusters”: A New Approach for Clustering Binary Variables.- Double k-means Clustering for Simultaneous Classification of Objects and Variables.- Discriminant Analysis.- Categorical FDA Under Prospective Sampling Scheme: a Proposal for Variable Selection.- The Effect of Telephone Survey Design on Discriminant Analysis.- Proximity Structures Analysis and Multidimensional Scaling.- A Dissimilarity Measure Between Probabilistic Symbolic Objects.- Recent Experimentation on Euclidean Approximations of Biased Euclidean Distances.- Comparing Capital Structure through Similarity Analysis: Evidence about Two Industrial Districts.- The Geometric Approach to the Comparison of Multivariate Time Trajectories.- Ultramine Spaces in Classification.- Genetic Algorithms and Neural Network.- Genetic Algorithms and Clustering: an Application to Fisher’s Iris Data.- Using Radial Basis Function Networks for Classification Problems.- Unconditional Latent Budget Analysis: a Neural Network Approach.- II Multivariate Data Analysis.- Factorial Methods.- Generalized Constrained Principal Component Analysis.- Interaction Terms in Homogeneity Analysis: Higher Order Non-Linear Multiple Correspondence Analysis.- Perturbation Models for Principal Component Analysis of Rainwater Pollution Data.- Core Matrix Rotation to Natural Zeros in Three-Mode Factor Analysis.- Textual Data Analysis.- A Factorial Technique for Analysing Textual Data with External Information.- Subjects on Using Open and Closed-EndedQuestions.- Regression Models for Data Analysis.- Alternative Error Term Specifications in the Log-Tobit Model.- A Customer Satisfaction Approach for User-Oriented Comparative Evalutations of Services.- Mixture Models for Maximum Likelihood Estimation from Incomplete Values.- Robust Inference in the Logistic Regression Model.- A Plot for Submodel Selection in Generalized Linear Models.- On the Use of Multivariate Regression Models in the Context of Multilevel Analysis.- Nonparametric Methods.- Nonparametric Estimation Methods for Sparse Contingency Tables.- Reduction of Prediction Error by Bagging Projection Pursuit Regression.- Selecting Regression Tree Models: a Statistical Testing Procedure.- Linear Fuzzy Regression Analysis with Asymmetric Spreads.- III Spatial and Time Series Data Analysis.- Time Series Analysis.- Forecasting Non-Linear Time Series: Empirical Evidences on Financial Data.- Dynamics and Comovements of Regional Exports in Italy.- Large-sample Properties of Neural Estimators in a Regression Model with ?-mixing Errors.- Subseries Length in MBB Procedure for ?-mixing Processes.- Modelling a Change of Classification by a Structural Time Series Approach.- Spatial Data Analysis.- Spatial Discriminant Analysis Using Covariates Information.- Some Aspects of Multivariate Geostatistics.- Exploring Multivariate Spatial Data: an Application to Election Data.- Measures of Distances for Spatial Data: an Application to the Banking Deposits in the Italian Provinces.- IV Applications and Case Studies.- Statistical Analysis of Papal Encyclicals.- Life Courses as Sequences: an Experiment in Clustering via Monothetic Divisive Algorithms.- Significance of the Classification for the Italian Service Sector Activities.- A Neural Net Model to Predict High Tides in Venice.-Author Index.- Keywords Index.