We compare a family of algorithms for the automatic generation of taxonomies by adapting the Heymannalgorithm in various ways. The core algorithm determines the generality of terms and iteratively inserts them in a growing taxonomy. Variants of the algorithm are created by altering the way and...

Since the pioneering research of Wendell Smith (1956), the concept of market segmentation has been one of the most pervasive activities in both the marketing academic literature and practice. In addition to being one of the major ways of operationalizing the marketing concept, marketing...

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a very popular optimization tool for mixture problems and in particular for model-based clustering problems. However, while the algorithm is convenient to implement and numerically very stable, it only produces local solutions. Thus, it may not...

Cycles play an important role when analyzing market phenomena. In many markets, both overlaying (weekly, seasonal or business cycles) and time-varying cycles (e.g. asymmetric lengths of peak and off peak or variation of business cycle length) exist simultaneously. Identification of these market...

In this paper business cycles are considered as a multivariate phenomenon and not as a univariate one determined e.g. by the GNP. The subject is to look for the number of phases of a business cycle, which can be motivated by the number of clusters in a given dataset of macro-economic variables....

In this paper we try to identify manufacturing and service clusters in Spain, using data from Mercantile Registers of 2006. The proposed methodology partially follows contributions of Duranton and Overman (2005), Brenner (2003 and 2004) and Ellison and Glaser (1997), but departing from them we...