This book focuses on exploratory data analysis, learning of latent structures in datasets, and unscrambling of knowledge. Coverage details a broad range of methods from multivariate statistics, clustering and classification, visualization and scaling as well as from data and time series analysis. It provides new approaches for information retrieval and data mining and reports a host of challenging applications in various fields.

This volume contains revised versions of selected papers presented dur ing the 23rd Annual Conference of the German Classification Society GfKl (Gesellschaft fiir Klassifikation). The conference took place at the Univer sity of Bielefeld (Germany) in March 1999 under the title "Classification and Information Processing at the Turn of the Millennium". Researchers and practitioners - interested in data analysis, classification, and information processing in the broad sense, including computer science, multimedia, WWW, knowledge discovery, and data mining as well as spe cial application areas such as (in alphabetical order) biology, finance, genome analysis, marketing, medicine, public health, and text analysis - had the op portunity to discuss recent developments and to establish cross-disciplinary cooperation in their fields of interest. Additionally, software and book pre sentations as well as several tutorial courses were organized. The scientific program of the conference included 18 plenary or semi plenary lectures and more than 100 presentations in special sections. The peer-reviewed papers are presented in 5 chapters as follows: * Data Analysis and Classification * Computer Science, Computational Statistics, and Data Mining * Management Science, Marketing, and Finance * Biology, Genome Analysis, and Medicine * Text Analysis and Information Retrieval As an unambiguous assignment of results to single chapters is sometimes difficult papers are grouped in a way that the editors found appropriate.

It is a great privilege and pleasure to write a foreword for a book honor ing Wolfgang Gaul on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Wolfgang Gaul is currently Professor of Business Administration and Management Science and the Head of the Institute of Decision Theory and Management Science, Faculty of Economics, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany. He is, by any measure, one of the most distinguished and eminent scholars in the world today. Wolfgang Gaul has been instrumental in numerous leading research initia tives and has achieved an unprecedented level of success in facilitating com munication among researchers in diverse disciplines from around the world. A particularly remarkable and unique aspect of his work is that he has been a leading scholar in such diverse areas of research as graph theory and net work models, reliability theory, stochastic optimization, operations research, probability theory, sampling theory, cluster analysis, scaling and multivariate data analysis. His activities have been directed not only at these and other theoretical topics, but also at applications of statistical and mathematical tools to a multitude of important problems in computer science (e.g., w- mining), business research (e.g., market segmentation), management science (e.g., decision support systems) and behavioral sciences (e.g., preference mea surement and data mining). All of his endeavors have been accomplished at the highest level of professional excellence."

Data analysis and machine learning are research areas at the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics and statistics. They cover general methods and techniques that can be applied to a vast set of applications such as web and text mining, marketing, medical science, bioinformatics and business intelligence. This volume contains the revised versions of selected papers in the field of data analysis, machine learning and applications presented during the 31st Annual Conference of the German Classification Society (Gesellschaft fur Klassifikation - GfKl). The conference was held at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany, in March 2007.

Das Buch bietet Lesern einen kompakten Einstieg in das moderne Marketing. Dabei legen die Autoren besonderen Wert auf die Vermittlung eines elementaren Methoden- und Modellverstandnisses. Dadurch soll der Leser in die Lage versetzt werden, qualitatives Faktenwissen mit analytischen Denkprinzipien zu verbinden, um auf dieser Grundlage profunde Marketingentscheidungen treffen zu konnen. Das Lehrbuch richtet sich in erster Linie an Studierende im Grund- oder Bachelor-Studium, die Lehrveranstaltungen zum Thema Marketing besuchen.