Decision trees are used very successfully for the identification resp. classification task of objects in many domains like marketing (e.g. Decker, Temme (2001)) or medicine. Other procedures to classify objects are for instance the logistic regression, the logit- or probit analysis, the linear...

Multidimensional scaling is very common in exploratory data analysis. It is mainly used to represent sets of objects with respect to their proximities in a low dimensional Euclidean space. Widely used optimization algorithms try to improve the representation via shifting its coordinates in...