Often considered more of an art than a science, books on clustering have been dominated by learning through example with techniques chosen almost through trial and error. Even the two most popular, and most related, clustering methods K-Means for partitioning and Ward's method for hierarchical clustering have lacked the theoretical underpinning required to establish a firm relationship between the two methods and relevant interpretation aids. Other approaches, such as spectral clustering or consensus clustering, are considered absolutely unrelated to each other or to the two above mentioned methods.

Clustering: A Data Recovery Approach, Second Edition presents a unified modeling approach for the most popular clustering methods: the K-Means and hierarchical techniques, especially for divisive clustering. It significantly expands coverage of the mathematics of data recovery, and includes a new chapter covering more recent popular network clustering approaches spectral, modularity and uniform, additive, and consensus treated within the same data recovery approach. Another added chapter covers cluster validation and interpretation, including recent developments for ontology-driven interpretation of clusters. Altogether, the insertions added a hundred pages to the book, even in spite of the fact that fragments unrelated to the main topics were removed.

Illustrated using a set of small real-world datasets and more than a hundred examples, the book is oriented towards students, practitioners, and theoreticians of cluster analysis. Covering topics that are beyond the scope of most texts, the author s explanations of data recovery methods, theory-based advice, pre- and post-processing issues and his clear, practical instructions for real-world data mining make this book ideally suited for teaching, self-study, and professional reference.

This state-of-the-art survey is dedicated to the memory of Emmanuil Markovich Braverman (1931-1977), a pioneer in developing machine learning theory. The 12 revised full papers and 4 short papers included in this volume were presented at the conference "Braverman Readings in Machine Learning: Key Ideas from Inception to Current State" held in Boston, MA, USA, in April 2017, commemorating the 40th anniversary of Emmanuil Braverman's decease. The papers present an overview of some of Braverman's ideas and approaches. The collection is divided in three parts. The first part bridges the past and the present and covers the concept of kernel function and its application to signal and image analysis as well as clustering. The second part presents a set of extensions of Braverman's work to issues of current interest both in theory and applications of machine learning. The third part includes short essays by a friend, a student, and a colleague.

I am very happy to have this opportunity to present the work of Boris Mirkin, a distinguished Russian scholar in the areas of data analysis and decision making methodologies. The monograph is devoted entirely to clustering, a discipline dispersed through many theoretical and application areas, from mathematical statistics and combina torial optimization to biology, sociology and organizational structures. It compiles an immense amount of research done to date, including many original Russian de velopments never presented to the international community before (for instance, cluster-by-cluster versions of the K-Means method in Chapter 4 or uniform par titioning in Chapter 5). The author's approach, approximation clustering, allows him both to systematize a great part of the discipline and to develop many in novative methods in the framework of optimization problems. The optimization methods considered are proved to be meaningful in the contexts of data analysis and clustering. The material presented in this book is quite interesting and stimulating in paradigms, clustering and optimization. On the other hand, it has a substantial application appeal. The book will be useful both to specialists and students in the fields of data analysis and clustering as well as in biology, psychology, economics, marketing research, artificial intelligence, and other scientific disciplines. Panos Pardalos, Series Editor."

Often considered more of an art than a science, books on clustering have been dominated by learning through example with techniques chosen almost through trial and error. Even the two most popular, and most related, clustering methods-K-Means for partitioning and Ward's method for hierarchical clustering-have lacked the theoretical underpinning required to establish a firm relationship between the two methods and relevant interpretation aids. Other approaches, such as spectral clustering or consensus clustering, are considered absolutely unrelated to each other or to the two above mentioned methods. Clustering: A Data Recovery Approach, Second Edition presents a unified modeling approach for the most popular clustering methods: the K-Means and hierarchical techniques, especially for divisive clustering. It significantly expands coverage of the mathematics of data recovery, and includes a new chapter covering more recent popular network clustering approaches-spectral, modularity and uniform, additive, and consensus-treated within the same data recovery approach. Another added chapter covers cluster validation and interpretation, including recent developments for ontology-driven interpretation of clusters. Altogether, the insertions added a hundred pages to the book, even in spite of the fact that fragments unrelated to the main topics were removed. Illustrated using a set of small real-world datasets and more than a hundred examples, the book is oriented towards students, practitioners, and theoreticians of cluster analysis. Covering topics that are beyond the scope of most texts, the author's explanations of data recovery methods, theory-based advice, pre- and post-processing issues and his clear, practical instructions for real-world data mining make this book ideally suited for teaching, self-study, and professional reference.

This text examines the goals of data analysis with respect to enhancing knowledge, and identifies data summarization and correlation analysis as the core issues. Data summarization, both quantitative and categorical, is treated within the encoder-decoder paradigm bringing forward a number of mathematically supported insights into the methods and relations between them. Two Chapters describe methods for categorical summarization: partitioning, divisive clustering and separate cluster finding and another explain the methods for quantitative summarization, Principal Component Analysis and PageRank. Features: * An in-depth presentation of K-means partitioning including a corresponding Pythagorean decomposition of the data scatter. * Advice regarding such issues as clustering of categorical and mixed scale data, similarity and network data, interpretation aids, anomalous clusters, the number of clusters, etc. * Thorough attention to data-driven modelling including a number of mathematically stated relations between statistical and geometrical concepts including those between goodness-of-fit criteria for decision trees and data standardization, similarity and consensus clustering, modularity clustering and uniform partitioning. New edition highlights: * Inclusion of ranking issues such as Google PageRank, linear stratification and tied rankings median, consensus clustering, semi-average clustering, one-cluster clustering * Restructured to make the logics more straightforward and sections self-contained Core Data Analysis: Summarization, Correlation and Visualization is aimed at those who are eager to participate in developing the field as well as appealing to novices and practitioners.