Data Science and Classification provides new methodological developments in data analysis and classification. The broad and comprehensive coverage includes the measurement of similarity and dissimilarity, methods for classification and clustering, network and graph analyses, analysis of symbolic data, and web mining. Beyond structural and theoretical results, the book offers application advice for a variety of problems, in medicine, microarray analysis, social network structures, and music.

This book provides an integrated treatment of blockmodeling, the most frequently used technique in social network analysis. It secures its mathematical foundations and then generalizes blockmodeling for the analysis of many types of network structures. Examples are used throughout the text and include small group structures, little league baseball teams, intra-organizational networks, inter-organizational networks, baboon grooming networks, marriage ties of noble families, trust networks, signed networks, Supreme Court decisions, journal citation networks, and alliance networks. Also provided is an integrated treatment of algebraic and graph theoretic concepts for network analysis and a broad introduction to cluster analysis. These formal ideas are the foundations for the authors' proposal for direct optimizational approaches to blockmodeling which yield blockmodels that best fit the data, a measure of fit that is integral to the establishment of blockmodels, and creates the potential for many generalizations and a deductive use of blockmodeling.