We consider a unified description of classification rules for nearly singular covariance matrices. When the covariance matrices of the groups or the pooled covariance matrix become nearly singular, bayesian classification rules become seriously unstable. Several procedures have been proposed to...

In order to group the observations of a data set into a given number of clusters, an ‘optimal’ subset out of a greater number of explanatory variables is to be selected. The problem is approached by maximizing a quality measure under certain restrictions that are supposed to keep the subset...

We investigate the combination of the dimension reduction methods SIR (Li, 1991) and DAME (Gather et al., 2001) with fuzzy-clustering to validate a given classification. We consider certain economic variables which are assumed to contain the information relevant to determine the current phase of...