Rezension
"The Handbook of Cluster Analysis provides a readable and fairly thorough overview of the highly interdisciplinary and growing field of cluster analysis. The editors rose to the challenge of the Handbook of Modern Statistical Methods series to balance well-developed methods with state-of-the-art research. The book is a collection of papers about how to find groups within data, each written by prominent researchers from computer science, statistics, data science, and elsewhere. Some chapters are application driven while others are solely focused on theory. The editors bookend the text with a solid overview and history of the literature at the beginning, to help newcomers navigate the rest of the handbook, and practical strategies at the end, to help a practitioner choose amongst the competing methods. ... Overall, the handbook is a thorough reference for past and present work. It gives the reader a general overview of the field, which is of great value since the work crosses many disciplinary boundaries. The numerous clustering methods are organized to help researchers find the relevant chapters and references therein. ..."- Brianna C. Heggeseth, Williams College, in Journal of the American Statistical Association, July 2017 "After an overview of approaches and a quick journey through the history of Cluster analysis, the book focuses on the four major approaches to Cluster analysis. ... This handbook is accessible to readers from various disciplines. .... All articles have a vast amount of hints to literature. So, the greatest benefit is that the interested reader can find the literature for her/his special clustering purpose."-Rainer Schlittgen, University of Hamburg, Germany, inStatistical Papers, September 2016 "From the wide ranging 'Handbooks of modern statistical methods' series, this book seeks to be a non-exhaustive guide to the subject in a large and expanding field. The book is well laid out over 31 chapters each having its own introduction and conclusion, spanning the material in a logical manner aiding accessibility. Its main focus is on partitioning sets, and care is taken to explain the exploratory nature of the analysis in contrast with the predictive task of classification (i.e. it covers unsupervised rather than supervised classification)...This is a comprehensive reference guide, which is well organized and has an approachable style with many examples. Great care has been taken to provide an appropriate level of detail by using illustrative and topical examples. As an overview of an increasingly important field, it provides a vital first reference guide for a range of techniques and modelling considerations."-Mark Pilling, University of Manchester, in Statistics in Society (Series A), October 2016 "This handbook is accessible to readers from various disciplines...All articles have a vast amount of hints to literature. So, the greatest benefit is that the interested reader can find the literature for her/his special clustering purpose."-Statistical Papers, June 2016
