Least-squares multidimensional scaling is known to have a serious problem of local minima, especially if one dimension is chosen, or if city-block distances are involved. One particular strategy, the smoothing strategy proposed by Pliner (1986, 1996), turns out to be quite successful in these...

A column generation based approach is proposed for solving the cluster-wise regression problem. The proposed strategy relies firstly on several efficient heuristic strategies to insert columns into the restricted master problem. If these heuristics fail to identify an improving column, an...