Ebook: Data Analysis and Decision Support

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.

---

The volume presents recent advances in data analysis and decision support and gives an actual overview on the interface between mathematics, operations research, statistics, computer science, and management science. Areas that receive considerable attention in the book are discrimination and clustering, multidimensional scaling, data mining and decision support systems as well as applications in marketing and corporate planning. The reader will find material on recent technical and methodological developments and a large number of applications demonstrating the usefulness of the newly developed techniques.

---

The volume presents recent advances in data analysis and decision support and gives an actual overview on the interface between mathematics, operations research, statistics, computer science, and management science. Areas that receive considerable attention in the book are discrimination and clustering, multidimensional scaling, data mining and decision support systems as well as applications in marketing and corporate planning. The reader will find material on recent technical and methodological developments and a large number of applications demonstrating the usefulness of the newly developed techniques.

Content:
Front Matter....Pages I-XI
Optimization in Symbolic Data Analysis: Dissimilarities, Class Centers, and Clustering....Pages 3-10
An Efficient Branch and Bound Procedure for Restricted Principal Components Analysis....Pages 11-20
A Tree Structured Classifier for Symbolic Class Description....Pages 21-29
A Diversity Measure for Tree-Based Classifier Ensembles....Pages 30-38
Repeated Confidence Intervals in Self-Organizing Studies....Pages 39-46
Fuzzy and Crisp Mahalanobis Fixed Point Clusters....Pages 47-56
Interpretation Aids for Multilayer Perceptron Neural Nets....Pages 57-64
An Unfolding Scaling Model for Aggregated Preferential Choice Data....Pages 65-72
Model-Based Clustering — Discussion on Some Approaches....Pages 73-81
Three-Way Multidimensional Scaling: Formal Properties and Relationships Between Scaling Methods....Pages 82-90
Empirical Approach as a Scientific Framework for Data Analysis....Pages 91-99
Asymmetric Multidimensional Scaling of Relationships Among Managers of a Firm....Pages 100-107
Aggregation of Ordinal Judgements Based on Condorcet’s Majority Rule....Pages 108-112
ANOVA Models with Generalized Inverses....Pages 113-121
Patterns in Search Queries....Pages 122-129
Performance Drivers for Depth-First Frequent Pattern Mining....Pages 130-140
On the Performance of Algorithms for Two-Mode Hierarchical Cluster Analysis — Results from a Monte Carlo Simulation Study....Pages 141-148
Clustering Including Dimensionality Reduction....Pages 149-156
The Number of Clusters in Market Segmentation....Pages 157-176
On Variability of Optimal Policies in Markov Decision Processes....Pages 177-185
Linking Quality Function Deployment and Conjoint Analysis for New Product Design....Pages 189-198
Financial Management in an International Company: An OR-Based Approach for a Logistics Service Provider....Pages 199-203
Development of a Long-Term Strategy for the Moscow Urban Transport System....Pages 204-211
The Importance of E-Commerce in China and Russia — An Empirical Comparison....Pages 212-221
Analyzing Trading Behavior in Transaction Data of Electronic Election Markets....Pages 222-230
Critical Success Factors for Data Mining Projects....Pages 231-240
Equity Analysis by Functional Approach....Pages 241-248
A Multidimensional Approach to Country of Origin Effects in the Automobile Market....Pages 249-256
An Empirical Examination of Daily Stock Return Distributions for U.S. Stocks....Pages 257-268
Stages, Gates, and Conflicts in New Product Development: A Classification Approach....Pages 269-281
Analytical Lead Management in the Automotive Industry....Pages 282-289
Die Nutzung von multivariaten statistischen Verfahren in der Praxis - Ein Erfahrungsbericht 20 Jahre danach....Pages 290-299
Heuristic Bundling....Pages 300-312
The Option of No-Purchase in the Empirical Description of Brand Choice Behaviour....Pages 313-322
klaR Analyzing German Business Cycles....Pages 323-334
Back Matter....Pages 335-343
....Pages 345-353