Binary trees for dissimilarity data

Binary segmentation procedures (in particular, classification and regression trees) are extended to study the relation between dissimilarity data and a set of explanatory variables. The proposed split criterion is very flexible, and can be applied to a wide range of data (e.g., mixed types of multiple responses, longitudinal data, sequence data). Also, it can be shown to be an extension of well-established criteria introduced in the literature on binary trees.