Book 344

This text provides an introduction to the practical application of cluster analysis and presents a selection of methods which together can deal with most applications. These methods are chosen for their robustness, consistency and general applicability. The main approaches to clustering are studied and guidance on choosing between the available methods is given. The authors also discuss various types of data, including interval-scaled and binary variables as well as similarity data, and explain ways in which these can be transformed prior to clustering. Numerous exercises are also included.

Book 589

WILEY-INTERSCIENCE PAPERBACK SERIES The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. "The writing style is clear and informal, and much of the discussion is oriented to application. In short, the book is a keeper." -Mathematical Geology "I would highly recommend the addition of this book to the libraries of both students and professionals. It is a useful textbook for the graduate student, because it emphasizes both the philosophy and practice of robustness in regression settings, and it provides excellent examples of precise, logical proofs of theorems...Even for those who are familiar with robustness, the book will be a good reference because it consolidates the research in high-breakdown affine equivariant estimators and includes an extensive bibliography in robust regression, outlier diagnostics, and related methods.
The aim of this book, the authors tell us, is 'to make robust regression available for everyday statistical practice.' Rousseeuw and Leroy have included all of the necessary ingredients to make this happen." -Journal of the American Statistical Association

Book 693

An introduction to the concepts, theory and applications of robust statistics, providing a comprehensive account of the infinitesimal approach and insight into the robustness properties of existing procedures. The book describes the effect of an outlier on virtually all classical statistical models and covers related notions such as the breakdown point and the change-of-variance functions.