Reinhold Decker - Böcker

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.

This volume contains revised versions of papers selected with respect to the topic "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 special application areas such as (in alphabetical order) biology, finance, genome analysis, marketing, medicine, public health, and text analysis - will find latest results received at the turn of the millennium and presented during GfKl's 1999 annual conference.

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.

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 für Klassifikation - GfKl). The conference was held at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany, in March 2007.