Finally there is a book that presents real applications of graph theory in a unified format. This book is the only source for an extended, concentrated focus on the theory and techniques common to various types of intersection graphs. It is a concise treatment of the aspects of intersection graphs that interconnect many standard concepts and form the foundation of a surprising array of applications to biology, computing, psychology, matrices, and statistics. The authors emphasize the underlying tools and techniques and demonstrate how this approach constitutes a definite theory within graph theory. Some of the applications are not widely known or available in the graph theoretic literature and are presented here for the first time. The book also includes a detailed literature guide for many specialized and related areas, a current bibliography, and more than 100 exercises.

Combinatorial data analysis (CDA) refers to a wide class of methods for the study of relevant data sets in which the arrangement of a collection of objects is absolutely central. The focus of this monograph is on the identification of arrangements, which are then further restricted to where the combinatorial search is carried out by a recursive optimization process based on the general principles of dynamic programming (DP).

The authors provide a comprehensive and self-contained review delineating a very general DP paradigm or schema that can serve two functions. First, the paradigm can be applied in various special forms to encompass all previously proposed applications suggested in the classification literature. Second, the paradigm can lead directly to many more novel uses. An appendix is included as a user's manual for a collection of programs available as freeware.

The incorporation of a wide variety of CDA tasks under one common optimization framework based on DP is one of the book's strongest points. The authors include verifiably optimal solutions to nontrivially sized problems over the array of data analysis tasks discussed.