The Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Bologna in collaboration with the Department of Management and Engineering of the University of Padova, the Department of Statistical Modelling of Saint Petersburg State University, and INFORMS Simulation Society sponsored the Seventh Workshop on Simulation. This international conference was devoted to statistical techniques in stochastic simulation, data collection, analysis of scientific experiments, and studies representing broad areas of interest. The previous workshops took place in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005, and 2009. The Seventh Workshop took place in the Rimini Campus of the University of Bologna, which is in Rimini's historical center.

The book showcases a selection of peer-reviewed papers, the preliminary versions of which were presented at a conference held 11-13 June 2011 in Bologna and organized jointly by the Italian Statistical Society (SIS), the Institute national Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and the Bank of Italy. The theme of the conference was "Statistics in the 150 years of the Unification of Italy."

The celebration of the anniversary of Italian unification provided the opportunity to examine and discuss the methodological aspects and applications from a historical perspective and both from a national and international point of view. The critical discussion on the issues of the past has made it possible to focus on recent advances, considering the studies of socio-economic and demographic changes in European countries. "

This volume contains revised versions of selected papers presented during the biannual meeting of the Classification and Data Analysis Group of SocietA Italiana di Statistica, which was held in Bologna, September 22-24, 2003. The scientific program of the conference included 80 contributed papers. Moreover it was possible to recruit six internationally renowned invited spe- ers for plenary talks on their current research works regarding the core topics of IFCS (the International Federation of Classification Societies) and Wo- gang Gaul and the colleagues of the GfKl organized a session. Thus, the conference provided a large number of scientists and experts from home and abroad with an attractive forum for discussions and mutual exchange of knowledge. The talks in the different sessions focused on methodological developments in supervised and unsupervised classification and in data analysis, also p- viding relevant contributions in the context of applications. This suggested the presentation of the 43 selected papers in three parts as follows: CLASSIFICATION AND CLUSTERING Non parametric classification Clustering and dissimilarities MULTIVARIATE STATISTICS AND DATA ANALYSIS APPLIED MULTIVARIATE STATISTICS Environmental data Microarray data Behavioural and text data Financial data We wish to express our gratitude to the authors whose enthusiastic p- ticipation made the meeting possible. We are very grateful to the reviewers for the time spent in their professional reviewing work. We would also like to extend our thanks to the chairpersons and discussants of the sessions: their comments and suggestions proved very stimulating both for the authors and the audience.