This volume presents 71 articles dealing with models and methods of data analysis and classification, statistics and stochastics, information systems and text analysis as well as manifold applications. These articles are se lected from about 160 papers presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fUr Klassifikation. This conference was organized by R. Klar, at the Abteilung fiir Medizinische Informatik of the University of Freiburg from March 6 to 8, 1996. Based on the submitted and revised papers eight sections have been arranged, where the number of papers in the sections is given in parentheses: 1. Data Analysis and Classification (10) 2. Neural Networks and Pattern Recognition (4) 3. Statistical Models and Methods (11) 4. Information Systems: Design and Implementation (7) 5. Text Analysis and Information Retrieval (10) 6. Applications in Medicine (15) 7. Applications in Economics and Social Sciences (7) 8. Applications in Archaeology, Biology, Linguistics and Dialectometry (7) This grouping doesn't separate strictly, but it shows how theoretical aspects, applications and interdisciplinarities are interrelated in many respects. For convenience of the reader the contents of this volumne is briefly summarized. 1. Data Analysis and Classification This section presents ten articles dealing with different problems of data analysis and classification, especially with several aspects of multidimen sional scaling (MDS), three-way data analysis, stochastic aspects in cluster ing and regression of ordinal data. The survey article of M. W. Trosset considers an approach to define and classify MDS problems as optimization problems."

In many fields of science and practice large amounts of data and informationare collected for analyzing and visualizing latent structures as orderings or classifications for example. This volume presents refereed and revised versions of 52 papers selected from the contributions of the 16th AnnualConference of the "German Classification Society." The papers are organized in three major sections on Data Analysis and Classification (1), InformationRetrieval, Knowledge Processing and Software (2), Applications and Special Topics (3). Moreover, the papers were grouped and ordered within the major sections. So, in the first section we find papers on Classification Methods, Fuzzy Classification, Multidimensional Scaling, Discriminant Analysis and Conceptual Analysis. The second section contains papers on Neural Networks and Computational Linguisticsin addition to the mentioned fields. An essential part of the third section attends to Sequence Data and Tree Reconstruction as well as Data Analysis and Informatics in Medicine. As special topics the volume presents applications in Thesauri, Archaeology, Musical Science and Psychometrics.