International Federation ofClassification Societies
Newsletter

President: Akinori Okada

Number 53

March, 2016
Editor:

The
International
Federation
ofClassification Societies, founded in 1985, iscomposed of:
Associação Portuguesa de Classificação e
Análise de Dados, British Classification
Society, Central American and Carribean
Society of Classification and Data Analysis,
The Classification Society, Classificationand Multivariate Statistics Group of the
Hungarian
Statistical
Association,
Gesellschaft für Klassifikation, Greek
Society of Data Analysis, Irish Pattern
Recognition and Classification Society,Japanese Classification Society, Korean
Classification
Society,
MoroccanClassification Society, Société FrancophonedeClassification,
Multivariate
Data
Analysis Group of the South African
Statistical Association,
Multivariate
Statistics and Classification Group of the
Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations
Research, Società Italiana di Statistica,
Statistical Society of Slovenia, Vereniging
voor Ordinatie en Classificatie and Sectionof Classification and Data Analysis of thePolish Statistical Society.
The IFCS is a non-profit, non-politicalscientific organization, the aims of which
are to further classification research.
Among other activities, the IFCS organises abiennial conference, and supports twojournals: Advances in Data Analysis andClassification
andtheJournalofClassification.

IFCS Homepage: http://www.ifcs.info

Paul McNicholas

Contents
Words from the IFCS President
News from the IFCS Secretary
News from the IFCS Publication Officer
The Classification Society Distinguished
Dissertation Award
News from CLAD
News from GfKl Data Science SocietyNews from the JCS
News from the VOC
News from The Classification Society
MBC2: Call for Papers
Foundation of the “European Association for
Data Science (EuADS)”
Upcoming Conferences and Meetings

Words from the IFCS President
It is my great pleasure to serve the IFCS as
President, and to contribute my first words as
President. I have the honour to succeed Maurizio
Vichi, who has served in the role of President for
the last two years. Maurizio has been an excellent
President and worked very hard. I look forward to
Maurizio’s contribution to the Executive
Committee as Past-President. I welcome Berthold
Lausen, Presideint-Elect, who is going to succeed
to the presidency in 2018. Berthold is adistinguished scientist and an excellent Presidentof the German Classification Society. I would
like to express my sincere thanks to Iven Van
Mechelen for his long service on the Executive
Committee, which has recently come to an end. I
appreciate Iven’s thoughtful and painstaking
contributions to the Executive Committee as wellas the Federation for the past 10 years as PastPresident, President, President-Elect, andTreasurer.
I would like to thank Christian Hennig, who has
worked very hard and made a magnificent
contribution to Federation as Secretary. I am verypleased that Nema Dean continues to serve the
Executive Committee as Treasurer. Nema has
made excellent and valuable contributions as
Treasurer in the last two terms. I am very happy
that Paul McNicholas remains on the Executive
Committee as Publication Officer. Paul has been
an excellent and active Publication Officer in thelast two terms. Maurizio Vichi, Berthold Lausen,
Christian Hennig, Nema Dean, Paul McNicholas
and I are on the IFCS Executive Committee in
2016-2017. I look forward to collaborating withthem. The Executive Committee will work hardto develop the Federation by expanding its
scientific horizons, both theoretically andpractically, over the next two years.
Plans and preparations are in progress for the next
IFCS meeting, IFCS 2017. The meeting will beheld in Tokyo, August 8-10, 2017, and more
information will be in Newsletter and the IFCS
website1. The Open Conference System (OCS),
which was used for IFCS 2015 in Bologna, will
be used to organize the meeting. The meeting will
be held at Takanawa Campus of Tokai
University, which is near Shinagawa, one of thedowntowns in Tokyo, and has direct access from
two airports in the Tokyo area by railway or bus.
The meeting is organized by Tokai University incooperation with the Japanese Classification
Society. I have visited the planned conference site
three times and spoken with the local organizers,
Tadshi Imaizumi and Yoshiro Yamamato. The
Japanese Classification Society successfully had
its Annual Meeting at the planned conference site
in February. I think IFCS 2017 will be very
successful at this site.
Akinori Okada
IFCS President

News from the IFCS Secretary
On 31 January 2016, the term of the IFCS
President Maurizio Vichi ended, and Akinori
Okada (JCS) took over as the new IFCS
President. The IFCS Council elected Berthold
Lausen (GfKl) as new President-Elect. Berthold
Lausen will become IFCS President in 2018. He
is also now member of the IFCS Executive
Committee, replacing the former Past-President
Iven van Mechelen.
1

http://ifcs.boku.ac.at/_conference/index.php/ifcs2017/ifcs2017

In December 2015, the IFCS Council approved
the IFCS membership of the Classification andMultivariate Statistics Group of the Hungarian
Statistical Association (HSA-CMSG) with 24
votes for approval and no votes against. The
President of the HSA-CMSG is Eva Laczka, andthe IFCS Council Representative is Roland
Szilagyi. The Italian CLADAG have a new
President, Salvatore Ingrassia. Their IFCS
Council Representatives are now Andrea Cerioli
and Francesco Palumbo. The new President of the
Greek GSDA is Giannoula Florou presiding overa new Board with five members. Their IFCS
Representative is Theodore Chadjipantelis.
The IFCS Executive Committee met on 17
December 2015 and on 24 March 2016. Here aresome items discussed there. There will be asession hosted by the Japanese Classification
Society on the COMPSTAT conference in
Oviedo, 23-26 August 2016. Hans-Hermann
Bock, the winner of the IFCS Research Medal at
the 2015 conference in Bologna, has used hisaward to fund a prize for data analysis that
supports research on breast cancer related cancer,
which will be awarded on the IFCS 2017conference in Tokyo. Organisation of the IFCS2017 conference including awards and theforming of the Scientific Programme Committee
is currently a central issue for the Executive
Committee.
We will also continue to discuss potentialchanges of the IFCS Constitution regarding the“group at large” and regarding the requirement
for members of the IFCS committees to be
representatives in the Council, which sometimes
makes it necessary to change committee members
despite their term not being fulfilled. We are also
working on putting more contact details of thepresidents and representatives of the member
societies on the IFCS webpage, whichfurthermore will have a page for events organisedby the member societies.
Please continue to inform me of any current
elections and nominations in the member
societies so that I can keep the IFCS directory up
to date. My best wishes go to all readers for thetime until the next newsletter. I wish you all agood year 2016.
Christian Hennig
IFCS Secretary

News from the IFCS Publication Officer

News from CLAD

I am delighted to have to modify the layout on thefirst column of the newsletter to accommodate
our growing federation! Many thanks to everyone
who has contributed to this newsletter. As
Akinori Okada’s term as IFCS President begins, I
wish him all the best in this very important role.

JOCLAD 2016
The XXIII Annual Meeting of the Associação
Portuguesa de CLassificação e Análise de Dados(CLAD) will be held from March 31 to April 2,
2016, at the Universidade de Évora, the second
oldest university in the country. JOCLAD 2016
will emphasize some of the main goals of CLAD:
promoting and developing research inclassification and data analysis area; encouragenational scientific production, in both theoreticaland applied aspects; improve cooperation,
discussion and scientific exchange between data
scientists and researchers from other sciences andapplication fields (e. g., environment, health,biology, sociology, demography, business,finance and statistics); strengthening CLAD’srole and cohesion. The meeting will also be an
opportunity to visit wonderful places in Alentejo.
Évora is the capital of the Alentejo region, a
UNESCO World Heritage Site and a member ofthe Most Ancient European Towns Network.

Paul McNicholas
IFCS Publication Officer

The Classification Society
Distinguished Dissertation Award
Each year, the Classification Society offers aDistinguished Dissertation Award for an
outstanding Ph.D. dissertation on the theme ofclustering, classification, or related areas of data
analysis, encompassing associated theory and/or
applications. Several nominations of high quality
were received for the 2016 award (for adissertation completed in 2015). As chair of theaward committee, I am delighted to announce thatthe winner of the 2016 award is
Zsuzsa Bakk, Tilburg University, The
Netherlands, for a thesis entitled
Contributions to Bias Adjusted Stepwise
Latent Class Modeling,and honourable mention goes toSamuel Ventura, Carnegie Mellon
University, USA, for a thesis entitledLarge-Scale Classification and Clustering
Methods With Applications in Record
Linkage.
Drs. Bakk and Ventura have been invited to speakat a special session of the Classification Society
annual meeting, which will be held at the
University of Missouri, Columbia, USA, from
June 1-4.
I would like to extend my thanks to Kathleen
Gates and Herbie Lee for serving with me on theaward committee. Details about nominations forthe 2017 award (for a dissertation completed in2016) will be available later this year.
Paul McNicholas

The JOCLAD 2016 scientific program includes
two short courses, three plenary invited lectures,four thematic sessions, four contributed paper
sessions in parallel and two poster sessions. Shortcourses will take place March 31 morning:
Amostragem em populações de difícil acesso(Russell Alpizar-Jara and Anabela Afonso,
Universidade de Évora,Portugal)andIntroduction to Multidimensional Scaling Models(José Fernando Vera, Universidad de Granada,
Spain).
JOCLAD 2016 plenary invited lectures are thefollowing: Appreciating Spatial Statistics throughcase studies with a focus on health underenvironmental and natural conditions (Alfred
Stein, University of Twente, Netherlands),
Cluster Multidimensional Scaling for large
proximity datasets (José Fernando Vera,
Universidad de Granada, Spain), Religião, Fogos
e Estatística: ponto de encontro (Antónia
Turkman, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa,
Portugal). The authors of the best research papers
presented at the Conference are invited to submit
full papers for publication in the next issue of
CLAD’s Book Series. Further information isavailable at http://www.clad.pt/.

CLAD sponsored courses
Following the series of CLAD sponsored courses,
the next short course, Análise de séries temporais– introdução e aplicações em R (Isabel Silva
Magalhães, Universidade do Porto, Portugal),
will take place June 4 at IST, Universidade deLisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.

Berthold Lausen (president), Hans Kestler (1stvice president), Daniel Baier (2nd vice president),
AndreasGeyer-Schulz(treasurer),
Eyke
Huellermeier, Sabine Krolak-Schwerdt, Adalbert
Wilhelm.
Berthold Lausen

Helena Bacelar-Nicolau

News from JCS
News from GfKl
Data Science Society
The 40th Annual Meeting of the GfKl was held at
the 4th DAGStat conference in Göttingen from1418 March 2016. GfKl is a founding member ofthe Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Statistik(DAGStat), which is a consortium of scientificsocieties and professional associations that regard
the further development of statistical theory andmethodology as their primary interest. DAGStat
conferences are organized every three years. The
DAGStat2016 conference included annual
meetings of the German Region of theInternational Biometric Society (Biometrisches
Kolloquium) and the German Statistical Society(Pfingsttagung) as well.
The conference was attended by more than 700
participants, plenary talks were Peter Rousseeuw(University of Leuven) Detecting cellwise
outliers, Hans Rudolf Künsch (ETH Zürich)Numerical weather prediction and statistics,
Simon Thompson (University of Cambridge)
Mendelian randomization: its potential andlimitations and Adalbert Wilhelm (Jacobs
University Bremen) Data-Driven Classificationin the Social Sciences. More details (program
booklet, etc.) are available via the conference
webpage
http://www.unigoettingen.de/en/485701.html. The DAGStat
medal was awarded to three fellows for their
distinguished contribution to the field: HansHermann Bock, Hans-Jürgen Läuter and Peter
Wilrich. The GfKl best paper award – methods –was given to Andre Burkovski for contributing
the outstanding paper “Ordinal prototype-basedclassifiers” to the European Conference on Data
Analysis (ECDA2015), 39th Annual Conferenceof the GfKl, in Colchester, UK, September 2-4.
The general assembly of the GfKl elected as
executive board of the society (2016-2019):(I) The 34th Annual Meeting of the JapaneseClassification Society
The 34th Annual Meeting was held on February
29th and March 1st, 2016 at Tokai University,
Takanawa Campus in Tokyo. The chairperson of
the organizing committee was Yoshiro
Yamamoto (Tokai University). There were
twelve talks; the speakers and the titles of theirtalks were as follows:
•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

Comparison of hierarchical cluster analysis
method in consideration of adjacency
relationship of unit of SOM, Yo Kameoka,
Yoshiro Yamamoto (both of Tokai
University).
A Model of Cluster Loading and Its
Application for a Variable Selection of High
Dimension Low Sample Size Data, Jiaxin
Chen, Mika Sato-Ilic (both of University ofTsukuba).
Kernel k-means based on Discriminant
Function. Yosuke Tsuji, Mika Sato-Ilic (bothof University of Tsukuba).
Fuzzy clusterwise generalized structurecomponent analysis based on regularization,
Yoji Yamashita, Kensuke Tanioka, Hiroshi
Yadohisa (all of Doshisha University).
Three-way principal component analysis
with a sparse core array – comparison withfactor rotation techniques, Hiroki Ikemoto
and Kohei Adachi (both of Osaka
University).
Principal Components based Variable
Selection for Data with External Criteria,
Toshiki Yamamoto, Mika Sato-Ilic (both of
University of Tsukuba).
Analyzing Competitive Relationships in
Brand Switching Using Advantageous andDisadvantageous Aspects of Brands, Akinori
Okada (Tama University), Hiroyuki Tsurumi(Yokohama National University).
Analysis using Association Plot for Medical
data,
Sanetoshi
Yamada,Yoshiro

•

•

•

•

Yamamoto, Kazuo Umezawa, Satomi Asai,
Masanori Hashimoto, Hayato Miyachi,
Sadaki Inokuchi (all of Tokai University).
Discussion of the classification method of thetendency for each of the sales of the productsof stores, Katsuya Kono, Yoshiro Yamamoto(both of Tokai University).
Analysis Exploited Classification Structure
for the Population Decline of RemoteIslands, Shota Yoshimoto, Mika Sato-Ilic(both of University of Tsukuba)
Classification of the Ability to Understanding
Statistics – Using the JSSC Examination
Answers Data, Jun Ttuchida, Masaki Okabe,
Hiroshi Yadohisa (all of Doshisha
University)
Trial of university classification in Japan
based on Daigaku Portrait database,
Masami Nishizawa, Naoya Todo, Yuan Sun(all of National Institute of Informatics)

There also took place a panel discussion about“Classification in the Era of Big Data”,
commemorating the IFCS 2017 meeting, which
was moderated by Fumitake Sakaori (Chuo
University). Also, a workshop about Kokyaku
Rikai notameno makethingu data bunseki[Marketing Data Analysis for Customer
Understanding] was held on February 29th. The
organizer was Yuki Toyoda (Hosei University)and the lecturers were Yuki Toyoda (Hosei
University) and Tadahiko Sato (University ofTsukuba).
(II) Publication of the Journal
The Volume 5 Number 1 of the Journal of theJapanese Classification Society, Deta Bunseki no
Riron to Oyo [Bulletin of Data Analysis], wassuccessfully published in the last March (allpapers are written in the Japanese language).
(III) Information about the 35th Annual
Meeting of the Japanese Classification Society
The 35th Annual Meeting will be held at the
beginning of March 2017 at Hosei Business
School of Innovation Management, Hosei
University, Tokyo. The chairperson of theorganizing committee is Yuki Toyoda (Hosei
University). For additional information, please
visit our website at http://www.bunrui.jp/.
Satoru Yokoyama

News from the VOC
Dear IFCS Member, the VOC would like toinvite you to its fifth VOC conference will takeplace on Friday the 27th of May in Tilburg (TheNetherlands). The deadline for abstract
submission is the 30th of April. A keynote talkwill be given by Eric Postma, coordinator of theBusiness and Governance Master’s program in
Data Science and professor in Artificial
Intelligence at Tilburg University, on “The
Return of Neural Networks”. Junior researchers
are especially encouraged to contribute; hence,
participation is free for PhD students (and VOC
members). Also this year the VOC awards a Best
Student Presentation Award; for enrollment andabstract
submissiongoto
http://www.voc.ac/index.php?type=5. On behalfof the organizing committee,
Katrijn Van DeunNews from The Classification Society
The 2016 Annual Classification Society
Conference will be held at the University ofMissouri-Columbia from June 1-4, 2016. Further
details and announcements will be posted
at www.classification-society.org.
Hans-Friedrich Köhn

MBC2: Call for Papers
The Third International Workshop on ModelBased Clustering and Classification will beorganized by the Department of Economics andBusiness of the Univerisity of Catania (Italy) andwill take place in Catania on September 5-7,
2016. The workshop aims to providing a focus onstate-of-the-art research in the field of modelbased clustering and classification as well as aforum of scientific discussions and comparisonsamong young and senior researchers. Topics
concern
methodological,
appliedandcomputational issues in model-based clusteringand classification. The workshop will take placewith the support of the Italian Statistical Society
and the Classification and Data Analysis Group(CLADAG). Interested people are invited tosubmit an abstract and some background
literature by May 7, 2016. For more information,

visit the website http://mbc2.unict.it or contact
mbc2@unict.it
Salvatore Ingrassia

Foundation of the “European
Association for Data Science (EuADS)”In July 2013 the first European Conference on
Data Analysis took place in Luxembourg. During
the conference a group of internationally wellrenowned scholars suggested to found theEuropean Association for Data Science (EuADS).
The foundation took place in August 2015.
Scope
The EuADS is a multidisciplinary association fordata science that comprises among the major
disciplines Biomedicine, Computer Science,
Economics, Educational Sciences, Engineering,
Linguistics, Machine Learning, Marketing,Mathematics, Medical and Health Sciences,
Psychology, Sociology and Statistics. This
multidisciplinarity finds its expression in thecollaboration of people from the National
Institute of Statistics and Economics STATEC,
the Luxembourg Institutes of Social-Economic
Research, Science and Technology as well as
Health, the German Classification Society(Gesellschaft für Klassifikation; GfKl) and the
University of Luxembourg which gives home to
the EuADS.
The EuADS aims to provide a setting for fosteringcommunication and cooperation among all
stakeholders of data science. It is a forum forresearch,scientificconduct,
promotingtransparent access to data, policy making as wellas support of young scientists. Scientifically, theassociation promotes the development of models,
methods and instruments of data science andprovides an environment for the presentation anddiscussion of new methods and models in thisfield. With regard to networking, it aims to bring
together stakeholders and decision-makers in thisfield to address the challenges of data science.
Thematic concerns of the EuADS are themathematical foundations of data science and thecomputational and statistical methods of data
analysis, the processing of statistical orconceptual information, and the construction ofdata bases and information (retrieval) systems

with the goal of discovering useful informationand extracting generalizable knowledge from
data. It focuses on topics such as structural andquantitative approaches for the analysis of data;advances in analytics, classification, clustering,and pattern recognition methods; strategies formodeling complex data and mining “big” data orlarge data sets; methods for the extraction ofknowledge from numerical or textual, structured
and semi-structured data, and applications ofadvanced methods to specific domains ofpractice. The association’s work supports
advances in theory and methodology on one
hand, while making new domain-specificknowledge available from data through theskillful use of data analysis methods, on the other
hand.
Activities
The EuADS aims to establish a network ofrenowned experts in the realm of data science. It
brings together successful stakeholders in thefield of data science to provide a state-of-the-art
knowledge base, to initiate new developments, topromote transparent access to data, and to advise
policy makers. Future activities will include
summer schools, thematic workshops andparticipation in the European Conferences on
Data Analysis.
After its foundation the EuADS participated in theEuropean Data Forum (EDF) which took placeon November 16-17 in Luxembourg. In
November 2016 the EuADS plans a kick-off
meeting which will take the form of a conference
for nationally and internationally renowned
stakeholders in the field of data science.
The EuADS welcomes contributions frompotential members, sponsors or anyone interested
in data science and its role and development in
the 21st century. Further information may befound under www.EuADS.org
Sabine Krolak-Schwerdt
Berthold Lausen
Hilmar Schneider
Myra Spiliopoulou
Claus Weihs

Upcoming Conferences and Meetings
May 2016
VOC Spring Meeting, May 27, Tilburg, The
Netherlands. http://www.voc.ac/index.php?type=5
June 2016
The Classification Society annual meeting, June
1-4, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO,
USA. www.classification-society.org
July 2016
Statistical Computing 2016, Schloss Reisensburg,
Günzburg, Germany, July 17-20. http://sysbio.uniulm.de/ocs/index.php/statcomp/statcomp16

September 2016
MBC2, the Third International Workshop on
Model-Based Clustering and Classification,
Catania, Italy, September 5-7. http://mbc2.unict.it
German-Japanese Symposium 2016, Schloss
Reisensburg, Günzburg, Germany, Sept. 12-13.
http://sysbio.uni-ulm.de/ocs/index.php/GJW/GJW16March 201735th Annual Meeting of the JapaneseClassifciation Society, Hosei Business School of
Innovation Management, Hosei University,
Tokyo. http://www.bunrui.jp/

Looking Ahead to IFCS Newsletter
Number 54
Contributions for the forthcoming issue of the
IFCS newsletter should be sent to PaulMcNicholas, IFCS Publication Officer, at
mcnicholas@math.mcmaster.ca by
September 24.
Plain text or Word files are preferred.
Thanks!
Paul McNicholas
IFCS Publication Officer