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.
