International Federation ofClassification Societies
Newsletter

President: Maurizio Vichi

Number 52

October, 2015
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, Gesellschaft fürKlassifikation, Greek Society of Data
Analysis, Irish Pattern Recognition andClassification
Society,
JapaneseClassification Society, Korean Classification
Society, Moroccan Classification Society,
Société Francophone de Classification,
Multivariate Data Analysis Group of theSouth African Statistical Association,
Multivariate Statistics and Classification
Group of the Spanish Society of Statistics
and Operations Research, Società Italiana diStatistica, Statistical Society of Slovenia,
Vereniging voor Ordinatie en Classificatieand Section of Classification and Data
Analysis of the Polish 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
The website contains, among other things: the
IFCS Constitution and By-Laws, IFCS
newsletters, and links to the websites ofmember societies.

Paul McNicholas

Contents
Words from the IFCS President
News from the IFCS Secretary
News from the IFCS Publication Officer
Report on IFCS 2015
IFCS Award Winners
Call for Submissions: BRCA Data Analysis
Award
Call for Nominations: CS Distinguished
Dissertation Award
News from CLAD
News from GfKl
News from the JCS
News from MDAG
News from the VOC
News from The Classification SocietyNews from the Greek Society of Data Analysis
News from the SFC
News from SKAD
IFCS Cluster Benchmark Data Repository: Callfor Contributions
Upcoming Conferences and Meetings

Words from the IFCS President
The IFCS 2015 conference was held July 6-8 in
Bologna. It was a clear success: 200 papers
presented, 220 participants, 5 plenary talks withexcellent international scientists, the initial
session celebrating the 30th anniversary of thefoundation of the Federation, 6 awards assigned
to outstanding researchers, including the first
IFCS research medal. I wish to thank the SPC andthe LOC for this successful conference; inparticular, the presidents Francesco Palumbo andAngela Montanari for the excellent program andthe wonderful hospitality in the beautiful city of
Bologna. I also wish to thank the IFCS Awards
Committee and, in particular, the President
Salvatore Ingrassia, for the intense and excellent
work done in assigning the awards. The next
IFCS Conference will be organized 8-10 August,in Tokyo. The Chair of the SPC is Tadashi
Imaizumi and the Vice-Chair of the SPC is
Sadaaki Miyamoto. Let me take this opportunity
to thank the Japanese Classification Society, and
the President Tadashi Imaizumi, for their
willingness to organize the next IFCS conference
and for their excellent work in preparing the bid
together with IFCS President-Elect Akinori
Okada.
This year, the IFCS celebrated the 30th
anniversary of its foundion. The Federation wasestablished 4th July 1985 by 6 associations. After
20 years, IFCS doubled to 12 societies in 2005. In
2006, IFCS has admitted the 13th member and, in
2009, the 14th. By the end of 2013, the IFCS had
reached 15 members with the Moroccan
Classification Society. In the last two years, two
new associations became members of IFCS: theMultivariate Statistics and Classification Groupof the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operation
Research SEIO-AMyC (http://amyc.seio.es/) andthe Multivariate Data Analysis Group of theSouth African Statistical Association (SASAMDAG)(http://www.sastat.org.za/mdag-0).
Now, the Classification and Multivariate
Statistics Group (CMSG-HSA) of the Hungarian
Statistical Association (HSA) has just applied to
become 18th member of the Federation. Finally, a
protocol of collaboration was recently signed
between IFCS and IASC. Therefore, after 30
years, the Federation has more than tripled its
membership and I feel that this is a testament to
the good heath of IFCS.
I am also proud to say that, after 30 years, thescope and purpose of the Federation – to promotemutual communication, co-operation andinterchange of views among all those interested inscientific principles, numerical methods, andpractice of data analysis and classification in a
broad sense and in as wide a range of applications
as possible – is still very innovative. The growing
needs of data, expressed by the new social andinstitutional attitudes of the Information Society
as well as the development of global processes
with almost infinite sources of data production,
have generated the need for new methodologies
to deal with the so called ‘data deluge’.
Phenomena are now described, in a richness ofdetail, by means of multivariate and complex
information that vary over time and space. The
data collected on these phenomena need new andadvanced methodologies to give realistic andappropriate results to users. The IFCS has always
been a melting pot of ideas and new
methodologies for exploring, modelling andanalysing data and for extracting the relevant
knowledge from them. The Federation, in Kobe
in 1996 and, again, Rome in 1998, was the firstscientific society to use the now trendy term Data
Science as a title of a conference. This qualifies
the pioneering research of IFCS on data analysis
presented already at that time. The IFCS
community of scientists has a multidisciplinary
connotation and uses techniques, theories, skills
and abilities that are specific to different
disciplines such as, statistics, probability,
mathematics, computer science, operations
research and applied engineering, just to cite afew. This mixing of different scientific attitudes
creates the richness of ideas and competences thatare now most useful to give appropriate responses
to the needs of the Information Society. In thisyear of celebration, I would also like to stress thehigh quality of papers presented at the IFCS
conferences and published in Journal ofClassification, Advances in Data Analysis andClassification and Studies in Classification, Data
Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Thus, myfinal wish for all the IFCS community is simply
to continue to explore innovative methodologies
and applications as it has done very successfullyin the last 30 years.
Dear readers, this is my final contribution to theNewsletter as President of the Federation because
I am at the end of my term (2014-2015). Let mesay, without rhetoric, that I was honoured to serve
as IFCS President. It was a real pleasure becasue
my research and scientific activities were always
close to the IFCS. I wish to take this occasion,
once again to warmly thank the Executive
Committee: Iven van Mechelen, Akinori Okada,
Christian Hennig, Paul McNicholas, and Nema
Dean who have worked hard during this period. I
also wish to thank the generous collaborations
from many volunteers within the IFCS
community that certainly improved the activitiesof the Federation. After 30 years, IFCS still has anumber of relevant challenging issues ahead and I
am sure the Federation will continue to solve
them in excellent ways under the capable
leadership of the incoming President, Akinori
Okada, to whom I wish all the best success.
Maurizio Vichi
IFCS President

News from the IFCS Secretary
The most important event after the last IFCS
Newsletter was the very successful and enjoyable
IFCS Conference in Bologna with almost 200
presentations and more than 200 participants. In
Bologna, an IFCS Council meeting took place,attended by 28 representatives, representing 15
societies including all the new IFCS member
societies MCS, SASA-MDAG and AMyC-SEIO.
Core items were the report on the conference in
Bologna and the presentation of the IFCS
conference in Tokyo 2017. The IFCS now
welcomes bids from member societies for hosting
the IFCS conference 2019. It is advisable to bid along time before the conference, and societies
who consider bidding should get in contact with
the IFCS Executive Committee, the President or
the President-Elect. Furthermore it was proposedand decided that there should from now on be
only two IFCS Newsletters per year again. The
Council decided to explore whether information
about IFCS representatives and member society
presidents could be put on the IFCS website insuch a way that the societies can edit thisinformation. However, in consultation with the
IFCS website administrator it emerged that thiswould be a lot of effort and raise security
concerns, so it seems better to only put the
information on the website, but to leave theediting to the IFCS Secretary, as before. A further
news item is that the IFCS has received an
applicationformembershipfromtheClassification and Multivariate Statistics Groupof the Hungarian Statistical Society, on which
there will soon be an IFCS Council ballot.
Since the last IFCS Newsletter, the IFCS
Executive Committee has met three times, on
18 June (via Skype), 5 July (in Bologna) and
24 September (via Skype). Much time on the firsttwo meetings was spent with preparations for the
conference in Bologna and the Council meeting.
The election of a new IFCS President-Elect was
prepared, and there was a discussion on the IFCS
contribution to conferences with which the IFCS
has an agreement. The next such conference thatcomes up is the COMPSTAT conference in
Oviedo, 23-26 August 2016. As IFCS Secretary, I
will be in the Scientific Programme Committee
and there will be one or two IFCS invited
sessions. The IFCS will also contribute to the61st World Statistics Conference in Marrakech,2017. 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.
Christian Hennig
IFCS Secretary

News from the IFCS Publication Officer
Thanks to everyone who contributed to thisnewsletter – there have been many contributions
this time and I hope this enthusiasm will continue
into future newsletters! As Maurizio Vichi’s term
as IFCS President comes to an end, I want tothank him for the wonderful work he has done on
behalf of the Federation; I thououghly enjoyedworking with him. I am very much looking
forward to working with Akinori Okada as his
term as IFCS President begins shortly.
Paul McNicholas
IFCS Publication Officer

Report on IFCS 2015
The last IFCS conference was hosted by the
Dipartimento di Statistica Paolo Fortunati at theAlma Mater Studiorum in Bologna, it was heldfrom July 5th to July 8th. Angela Montanarichaired the Local Organizing Committee andFrancesco Palumbo (University of Naples
Federico II) chaired the Scientific Program
Committee. Both of them have served the ItalianClassification and Data Analysis society as
President. A very special plenary session wasorganized to celebrate the IFCS 30th anniversary.
The session saw the participation of two eminent
IFCS past Presidents: H. H. Bock and professor
J. Gower. It was an excellent opportunity toappreciate the long road made by the Federation
during these 30 years.
This Conference saw over 220 participants fromacross the country and from around the world.
As usual the Conference program was organizedover plenary invited sessions, specialized sessions
and contributed paper sessions. Trevor Hastie(USA), Marco Riani (Italy), Gerda Claeskens(Belgium) and Terry Speed (Australia) wereinvited to give a plenary talk; one more plenary
session was the Presidential Address of IFCS

from Maurizio Vichi (Italy). The whole numberof contributions, including 11 posters, was 200.
The effort of our colleagues at the University of
Bologna made possible this conference such a
success. The high quality of the contributions was
assured by the work of all members of the
Scientific Program Committee. Our deepest
gratitude goes foremost to all of them. A special
thank must be addressed to Laura Anderlucci who
has supported the participants via the conference
website.
A post-proceedings volume will be edited byAngela Montanari, Francesco Palumbo, andMaurizio Vichi and will be published by Springer
in the prestigious series on Studies inClassification, Data Analysis and Knowledge
Organization (ISSN: 1431-8814). Authors havebeen invited to submit their contributions via theconference website http://ifcs.baku.ac.at/ifcs2015.
The deadline for submitting the 10/12 pages full
paper is December 18th.
Francesco Palumbo

IFCS Award Winners
The winners of the IFCS awards, presented at
IFCS 2015, are:
• IFCS Research Medal: Hans-Hermann Bock.
• Chikio Hayashi Award: Ryan Browne.
• Student / Post-Doctoral Fellow Paper:
Silke Janitza and Brian Franczak• Poster Prize: Francesca Fortunato.
I would like to underline that this has been thefirst time for many of these prizes and thisattracted the interest of many researchers.
Salvatore Ingrassia

Call for Submissions:
BRCA Data Analysis Award
Under the auspices of:• Data Science Society GfKl
• IFCS• International Biometric Society – Deutsche
Region• Deutsches Konsortium Familiärer Brust- undEierstockkrebs•

HeritX: Sparking Solutions for Inherited
CancerThe BRCA Data Analysis Award will be
conferred for original and innovative work thatuses data-analytic and statistical methods in orderto support the development of strategies for theprevention of Breast Cancer (BRCA) related
inherited cancer. Data analysis techniques,combined with computational algorithms, arebroadly and routinely applied in many fields like
medicine, bioinformatics, economics, marketing,pattern recognition, sociology, etc. Typicalapproaches
includestatisticalmodeling,classification and clustering, factorial analysis,
exploratory
tools,
andvisualization.
Representative scientific societies are, e.g., theInternational Federation of Classification
Societies, the German Classification Society, theBiometric Society, and others.
This award concentrates on the domain of
inherited cancer research. In fact, inherited cancer
is affecting millions of people worldwide. It
devastates entire families, from generation to
generation. The most prominent type is caused bya genetic change (mutation) in the so-called
BRCA gene (with subtypes BRCA1, BRCA2etc.). A carrier of this gene defect will, not only
and with a large probability, develop breast,
ovarian or other cancers, while fifty percent ofher children will inherit the defective gene andthe implied cancer risk as well. In contrast toother cancer types, inherited cancer can andshould be intelligently prevented already before it
starts rather than being intensively treated after it
has occurred. This seems to be achievablebecause the first step in the development of
BRCA-related cancer, the inherited gene defect,
is known from the outset. However, there is alack of research and innovation in transforming
this knowledge into a practical treatment andstrategy. To change this situation, newapproaches are necessary and might be supported
by data-analytic methods. This goal underlies the
BRCA Data Analysis Award and also is followedby various medical, scientific, and commercial
institutions, including, e.g., the global nonprofit
research initiative HeritX in USA.
The BRCA Data Analysis Award has been
introduced
torecognizeacompellinginvestigation that is related to inherited BRCA
genes and may benefit the early diagnosis and/or
medical prevention of BRCA-related cancer byusing data-analytic methods. The award includes
a honorarium of 1000 € (for personal use) and thepresentation (in person) of the author’s work at
one of the major conferences on data analysis andits applications. The award not only honors
relevant research in the BRCA field, but also isintended to motivate young researchers across thedata analysis community to address problems inthis field. Qualified research needs to becompleted in 2014-2016, and its author must be≤ 40 years. Among the list of submitting
candidates and works the winner will be selected
through an expert committee across BRCA
research and data analysis, orchestrated by HansHermann Bock.
Interested researchers are invited to submit anomination package including:
1. a brief summary (two pages or less) of thework or investigation on which the candidacy
is based, which explains its relevance to a)
the field of BRCA, b) the data analytic
method proposed, and c) its potential benefit
for the early diagnosis and/or medical
prevention of BRCA-related cancer,
2. up to three published papers, an accepted
thesis, or an accepted manuscript,
3. a curriculum vitae, and4. the names and addresses of two referees,to BRCA-Award@gfkl.de, until September 30,
2016. Candidates will be notified by the end of
2016. For further information see the website
www.isw.rwth-aachen.de/BRCA-Award.php.
Hans-Hermann Bock

Call for Nominations:
The Classification Society
Distinguished Dissertation Award
Each year, the Classification Society offers aDistinguished Dissertation Award (the Award,
hereafter) for an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation on
the theme of clustering, classification, or relatedareas of data analysis, encompassing associatedtheory and/or applications. The 2016 Award
totals US$500 in book vouchers from Chapman
and Hall/CRC and the winner will be invited tomake a presentation in a special session at the2016 Classification Society Annual Meeting,which will be held at the University of Missourifrom June 1-4. The Classification Society will
cover travel expenses to the 2016 Annual

Meeting of at most US$1,000 for a North
American-based Award winner or at most
US$1,500 for an Award winner based elsewhere.
Criteria for nomination for the Award include: (i)the dissertation contains innovative or impressive
work in theory/methodology, or innovative or
well-developed application(s); and (ii) theliterature review is thorough. To be eligible fornomination, a Ph.D. dissertation must have beensuccessfully completed – including successful
defense – within the calendar year 2015.
Nominations may be made by the dissertation
author, advisor/supervisor, or related person. A
nomination must include contact information for
the nominator and nominee (if different), a URL
where an online copy of the dissertation can beaccessed by the members of the Award
Committee, and an electronic (e.g., scanned)
cover letter, written and signed by the nominator,
stating the date of completion of the Ph.D.
dissertation and outlining why the dissertation
merits the award. The nominator must also
arrange for two external referee reports to be sent
directly to the chair of the Award committee. If
possible, the referees should be arms length fromthe dissertation author and their supervisor.
Cover letters should include full bibliographic
details for any published papers, proceedings,
book chapters, or similar scholarly material thathas arisen from the dissertation. For non-English
language dissertations, nominators are requested
to provide an extended abstract in English and,
where relevant, to highlight any papers,
proceedings, book chapters, or similar scholarlymaterial associated with the thesis that has been
published in English.
The 2016 Award Committee comprises:• Kathleen Gates (The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States),• Herbie Lee (University of California, Santa
Cruz, United States), and• Paul McNicholas (McMaster University,
Canada).
Nominations and external referee reports must be
submitted to the chair of the Award Committee,
Paul McNicholas, at paulmc ‘at’ mcmaster ‘dot’
ca, on or before February 5, 2016. Results will
be announced approximately two months after
this submission deadline.
Paul McNicholas

News from CLAD
JOCLAD 2015
The XXII Annual Meeting of the Associação
Portuguesa de CLassificação e Análise de Dados(CLAD), JOCLAD 2015, was held April 10-11
2015 at the Escola Superior de Tecnologia do
Barreiro – Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal. There
were about 65 participants and 50 papers were
presented. The conference program included 3
plenary invited lectures, 4 thematic sessions, 8parallel sessions and a poster session. Two shortcourses took place April 10. Further information
is available on the conference website:
http://joclad2015.estbarreiro.ips.pt/. The authorsof the best applied research papers presented at
the conference were invited to submit full papers
for publication in the next issue of CLAD Books
Series. The publication will contain a cluster ofrefereed articles which were presented in latest
JOCLAD meetings. Editors are H-BacelarNicolau, Fernanda Sousa, Carlos Marcelo andOtília Dias. Publisher is the Instituto Nacional deEstatística, INE.
CLAD New Cooperation Protocol
A Cooperation Protocol of associate membership
between CLAD and APD, the Associação
Portuguesa de Demografia, was signed during
the XXII Annual Meeting by the APD president,
Maria Filomena Mendes, and the CLAD
president José Gonçalves Dias.
CLAD Sponsored Courses
Following the series of CLAD sponsored courses,
four short courses took place on April, May andon October:- Two half-day courses were held April 10 in thescope of JOCLAD2015, hosted by the Escola
Superior de Tecnologia do Barreiro, Instituto
PolitécnicodeSetúbal:“Model-based
Clustering - presentationoftheMixmodsoftware” (Gilles Celeux, INRIA Saclay-Île-deFrance, France) and “Análise de Dados nasCiências da Saúde” (Cristina Rocha, Faculdadede Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)- A one day course was held May 30 under the
topic “Modelos com Equações Estruturais aplicações com LISREL e AMOS” (Maria deFátima Salgueiro, Instituto Universitário deLisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal). The course washosted by the Centro de Sondagens e Estudos
Estatísticos, Instituto Politécnico de Tomar.

- A one day course on “Como criar um package
na linguagem R” (Pedro Duarte Silva,
Universidade Católica, Porto, Portugal) was held
October 24, at the INE - Lisboa. The courseorganization was associated with the second
World Statistics Day, WSD2015, which wasobserved on 20 October 2015, under the theme'Better Data, Better Lives'.
JOCLAD 2016
The XXIII Annual Meeting will be held fromMarch 31 to April 2, 2016, at the Universidade de
Évora, the second oldest university in the
country. Évora is the capital of the Alentejo
region, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and amember of the Most Ancient European Towns
Network. More information on JOCLAD 2016
may be found at http://www.clad.pt/.
Helena Bacelar-Nicolau

News fromGesellschaft für Klassifikation (GfKl)
Data Science Society
The European Conference on Data Analysis 2015
(ECDA2015), co-hosted by the British
Classification Society (BCS), Gesellschaft fürKlassifikation e.V. (GfKl) and Sekcja Klasyfikacji
i Analizy Danych (SKAD) and held at the
University of Essex, Colchester, UK from 1st to
4th September 2015 (conference webpage
www.ecda2015.eu). After the successful ECDA
conferences in Luxembourg (2013) and Bremen(2014), participants came from 19 different
countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus,
Germany, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg,
Morocco, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland,
Portugal, South Africa, Tunisia, United Kingdom,
United States of America and Switzerland. The
conference included the 39th Annual Meeting of
the German Classification Society and the
Librarians and Information Science (LIS)
Workshop. Keynotes of the conference were
• Hendrik Blockeel, Leuven: Declarative data
analysis• Ulf Brefeld, Darmstadt: Capturing user
behaviour• Andrzej Dudek, Wroclaw: Cluster analysis
in the XXI century, new algorithms andtendencies

•

•
•
•
•

•

Arthur
Gretton,London:Kernelnonparametric tests of homogeneity,
independence and multi-variable interaction
Janette McQuillan, London: Crowdsourcing
classifications to accelerate cancer research
Christine Müller, Dortmund: Data depth
Iris Pigeot, Bremen: Challenges in thestatistical analysis of longitudinal data
Claus Weihs, Dortmund: Efficient global
optimization: motivation, variation, andapplication
Stefan Wrobel, Bonn: Data analytics in a
networked world

The conference had invited and contributed
sessions under the headings Data Analysis, Data
Science, Clustering, Classification, Machine
Learning and Knowledge Discovery, Library andInformation Science, Finance and Economics,
Digital Humanities and Social Sciences,
Geosciences and Archaeology, Marketing,Musicology, Machine Learning and Knowledge
Discovery, Outliers in Classification, Life
Sciences, Mathematical Foundations of Data
Science, Education, Big Data, Engineering,
Logistics and Optimisation.
The GfKl Best Paper Award 2014 was awarded
for the paper at ECDA2014 Incremental
Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis byAngelos Markos (Democritus University ofThrace) and Alfonso Iodice D’Enza (Universityof Cassino and Southern Lazio). Professor Hans
Kestler were the laudator and Professor Angelo
Markos gave a short presentation on the awarded
paper in opening session of the conference.
Sponsors of the ECDA2015 were the data science
company Profusion Ltd, London and the Institutefor Analytics and Data Science, University ofEssex. The conference dinner was at Colchester
Castle, the biggest Keep ever built in the United
Kingdom and the largest that remains in existence
throughout Europe.
At the general annual meeting the members of
GfKl decided to add Data Science Society to thename of the Society. The members awarded
Professor Gunter Ritter, Passau, the honorary
membership of GfKl. As honorary member
Gunter Ritter is a member of the GfKl advisoryboard together with the honorary president Hans
Bock and the honorary members Wolfgang Gaul,
Otto Opitz and Claus Weihs. The other membersof the advisory board were elected - as usual - by

the board of the society for a term of three years(2013-16): Christian Hennig (London), Lars
Schmidt-Thieme (Hildesheim), Frank Scholze(Karlsruhe), Myra Spiliopoulou (Magdeburg) and
Alfred Ultsch (Marburg).
GfKl Data Science Society will celebrate its 40th
Annual Meeting at the Fourth Joint Statistical
Meeting of the Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft
Statistik “Statistics under one Umbrella” 14 - 18
March 2016 at the Georg-August University
Göttingen(DAGStat2016)
inGöttingen,
DAGStat 2016 includes the 40th Annual Meetingof GfKl, 62. Kolloquium of the German Regionof the International Biometric Society and the
Pfingsttagung of the German Statistical Society.
In September 2016, we plan to have the next joint
workshop with the Japanese Classification
Society at Schloss Reisensburg in Germany andin August 2017 before or after the IFCS2017
conference in Japan. The next German-Polishmeeting is planned in September 2017 before theECDA2017 in Wroclaw. In spring 2017 we willcelebrate 40 years Gesellschaft für Klassifikation
Data Science Society (founded February 1977 inFrankfurt am Main).
Berthold LausenNews from JCS(I) New Executive Members of JCS
The following list includes the new staff of theJapanese Classification Society elected according
to the articles of the JCS governing the election of
Executive Members. The tenure for thesemembers is April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2017.
PRESIDENT:
Tadashi Imaizumi, Tama University,
imaizumi@tama.ac.jp
SECRETARIAT MEMBERS:Secretary:
AtsuhoNakayama,
Tokyo
Metropolitan University. General affairs:
Takafumi Kubota, Tama University. Public
relations: Satoru Yokoyama, Teikyo University.
Treasurer: Yasunari Kono, Rikkyo University.
Koji Kurihara, Okayama University; Sadaaki
Miyamoto, University of Tsukuba; Masahiro
Mizuta, Hokkaido University; Akinori Okada,
Tama University; Fumitake Sakaori, Chuo

University; Yuki Toyoda, Hosei University;
Hiroyuki
Tsurumi,Yokohama
National
University;
HiroshiYadohisa,
Doshisha
University;
YoshiroYamamoto,
Tokai
University.
AUDITORS:
Akinobu Takeuchi, Jissen Women’s University;
Atsuhiro Hayashi, Kyushu University.
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Noboru Ohsumi, Tatsuo Otsu, Yutaka Kano, Koji
Kurihara, Fumitake Sakaori, Mika Sato-Ilic,
Kazuo Shigemasu, Yuki Toyoda, Atsuho
Nakayama, Yasumasa Baba, Fumi Hayashi,
Masahiro Mizuta, Takashi Murakami, Hiroshi
Yadohisa,
Kazue
Yamaoka,
Kazunori
Yamaguchi,
YoshiroYamamoto,
SatoruYokoyama, Ryozo Yoshino, Michiko Watanabe.
(II) The Japanese Classification Society
Symposium on “Correspondence Analysis,
Dual Scaling, and Quantification Theory, thepresent and the future”.
The symposium was held on September 9th 2015
at Okayama University, Tsushima Campus in
Okayama Pref. under the 2015 Japanese Joint
Statistical Meeting. The organizer, discussant,speakers were as follows:• Organizer:
TadashiImaizumi,
Tama
University.
• Discussant: Kohei Adachi, Osaka University.
Speaker and co-speaker(s): Tadashi Imaizumi,
Tama University; Takashi Murakami, Chukyo
University; Yoshiro Yamamoto and Sanetoshi
Yamada, Tokai University; Fumi Hayashi, Toyo
Eiwa University; and Kazue Yamaoka, Teikyo
University. The official Web site of the 2015
Japanese
Joint
Statistical
Meetingis
http://www.jfssa.jp/taikai/2015/.
(III) Information about the 34th Annual
Meeting of the Japanese Classification Society
The 34th Annual Meeting will be held on
February 29th and March 1st, 2016 at Tokai
University, Takanawa Campus in Tokyo. The
chairperson of the organizing committee isToshiro YAMAMOTO (Tokai University). For
additional information, please visit our website at
http://www.bunrui.jp/.
Satoru Yokoyama

News from MDAG
The annual meeting of the Multivariate Data
Analysis Group (MDAG) will take place during
the South African Statistical Association (SASA)
Conference from 29 November - 2 December
2015. The MDAG members will also be
addressed by Professor Maurizio Vichi during a
special interest session on Multivariate Data
Analysis. Since the founding of the group in
2013, the number of active members has
increased to a network of 54 multivariate data
enthusiasts.
MDAG is also looking forward to hosting theupcoming Correspondence Analysis and Related
Methods (CARME) conference in 2019
surrounded by the picturesque mountains of CapeTown, South Africa. This will be the first
CARME conference not held on European soil.
Johané Nienkemper-Swanepoel

News from the VOC
On the 29th of May, 2015, the VOC had its fourth
conference in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) incollaboration with the Analytical ChemistryChemometrics Research Group of the Radboud
University Nijmegen. A key note lecture wasgiven by Morten A. Rasmussen (University of
Copenhagen, Denmark) on ‘Notes on some ideas
from the Netherlands – seen from a Danish
perspective’. Furthermore, there were many
excellent contributions on a range of topics(including chemometrics, optimal treatment
regimes, clustering, factor analysis, and latentclass analysis). At this occasion, a best student
presentation award was given to Mattis van den
Bergh (Tilburg University) who presented a paperon ‘Divisive latent class analysis applied to social
capital’.
Katrijn Van DeunNews from The Classification Society
CS 2015The 2015 meeting of The Classification Society
took place from June 3-6 at McMaster Univeristy,
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. This was the 44th
meeting of The Classification Society, and justthe 6th time the meeting was held in Canada.
Around 50 delegates attended the meeting,comeing from eight countries: The Netherlands,
Italy, France, UK, Belgium, Germany, US (sixstates), and Canada (three provinces). In all, there
were five keynote lectures:• President’s Invited Address: Jeroen Vermunt,
Tilburg University, The Nethrlands.
• Pesident’s Address: Douglas Steinley,
University of Missouri, United States.
• Invited Lecture on Big Data: Fionn Murtagh,
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.
• Invited
Lectureon
Classification
Methodology:
Vincent
Vandewalle,
University Lille 2, France.
• Invited Lecture on Psychometrics Katie
Gates, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, United States.
There were also three invited sessions, threecontributed sessions, and a poster session. One of
the invited sessions was on 50 Years of theClassification Society, and it sparked some very
interesting
historical
discussion!
The
Classification Society Distinguished Dissertation
Awards for 2013 and 2014 were presented at thebanquet, which was held at the Royal Botanical
Gardens. The winners are:
• Distinguised Dissertation Award 2014:
Irene Vrbik.
• Distinguised Dissertation Award 2013:
Kim De Roover.
CS 2016
The 2016 meeting of The Classification Society
will take place from June 1-4 at the University ofMissouri, Columbia, MO. Details will soon beavailable at www.classification-society.org.
Paul McNicholas

News from theGreek Society of Data Analysis
The 8th Panhellenic Conference of Data Analysis,
Alexandroupolis, Greece, from September 10th to
12th, 2015 in Democritus University ofThrace. The conference was organized by
Achilles Dramalidis and Angelos Markos(Democritus University of Thrace). The meeting
was a very successful and fruitful event, whereexperts from academia and industry sharedinterdisciplinary research results and experiences.

This edition attracted more than 60 participantsfrom different countries such as Greece, France,
Italy, Germany, Spain and Nigeria.
Angelos Markos

News from the SFC
1. SFC Meeting (2015)
The 22th meeting of the SFC was held in Nantes(France)on
9-11
September
2015(http://sfc2015.sciencesconf.org/).
It
wasorganized by the University of Nantes. About 70
researchers participated to the meeting and 31
papers were presented. Invited sessions wereorganized with the following speakers: Gilbert
Saporta, Michel Grossetti, Jean Loup Guillaume.
The Price Simon Regnier 2015 was awarded thisyear to François Queyroi for his work titled:
Clustering large graphs: Measures, Algorithms
and Visualization (Partitionnement de grands
graphes : Mesures, Algorithmes et Visualisation).
2. AAFD & SFC Meeting (2016)
The next (23st) meeting of the French speaking
Classification Society will held in Marrakach(Morocco) on 22-26 May, 2016. It will becolocated with 7th edition of the biennial
symposium “Artificial Learning and Data
Mining” (AAFD). It will be organized by the
Moroccan Society of Classification (SMC),
Moroccan Society of Applied Mathematics(SM2A), AAFD (LIPN, University of Paris 13)
and SFC.
Mustapha Lebbah

News from the SKAD
The 24th Scientific Conference of Classification
and Data Analysis Section (SKAD) of Polish
Statistical Society (the 29th Taxonomic
Conference) on “Classification and Data Analysis− Theory and Applicationsˮ was held on 14th16th September in 2015 in Novotel Gdańsk
Marina Hotel in Gdańsk. The conference wasorganized by SKAD and Department of Statistics
of University of Gdańsk. The conference topics
included:a) theory (taxonomy, discriminant analysis, linear
ordering methods, multivariate statistical analysis
methods, continuous variables analysis methods,

discrete variables analysis methods, symbolic
data analysis methods, graphical methods),b) applications (data analysis in finance,
marketing, spatial data analysis, others
applications of data analysis − medicine,
psychology,archaeology,
etc.,computerapplicationsofstatisticalmethods).
There were 81 conference participants. During 2
plenary sessions and 13 parallel sessions theparticipants have presented 58 papers.
Additionally, a poster session was organized,
during which 14 posters were shown. The
conference participants have prepared articles
which will be reviewed and then published in
Taxonomy Series no. 26 and 27 (as part of
Research Papers of Wrocław University of
Economics) and Statistics in Transition New
Series (an international journal published jointly
by the Polish Statistical Association and theCentral Statistical Office of Poland).
Krzysztof Najman

IFCS Cluster Benchmark Data
Repository: Call for Contributions
The IFCS Task Force on Benchmarking invites
all researchers interested in clustering andclassification to contribute data sets to the IFCS
Cluster
BenchmarkData
Repository(http://ifcs.boku.ac.at/repository/). With thisrepository the Task Force aims to create a unique
resource of data sets (along with comprehensive
documentation on their background and on goals
for subjecting them to cluster analyses) that canbe used to compare the performance of clustering
methods and associated data-analytic procedures.
BackgroundAt present, very often new clustering methods,
algorithms, and data-analytic procedures (e.g.,
procedures to determine the number of clusters ina data set) are being proposed without adequate
comparisons with current best practices, andwithout sufficient evidence of good performanceon benchmarking datasets. In particular, newmethods and procedures are often proposed alongwith results from a few simulations and analysesof a few real datasets chosen in an unsystematicmanner. Sometimes such simulations andanalyses may involve comparisons with one or
two alternative methods, but without discussionof the specific conditions under which the new
method or procedure is supposed to work well,what kind of clusters it attempts to find, and what
would therefore be the most appropriatecompetitors. Otherwise, comparative work often
implicitly assumes that there should be a uniquebest method for general clustering, and thensuggests, based on a handful of experiments, thatthe newly proposed method is a promising
candidate for this position, without giving any
idea about potential weaknesses and limitations.
In general, it seems clear that benchmarking
methods for cluster analysis (unsupervisedclassification) and related data-analytic methods
is nontrivial. Particularly it is essentially moredifficult than benchmarking in supervisedclassification. The reason is that, typically insupervised classification, there is a single truegrouping, and performance can be measured bylooking
at(potentiallyweighted)
misclassification percentages. In cluster analysis,
however, different aims of clustering may lead todifferent clusterings on the same dataset that
could be optimal according to different criteria(e.g., overall low within-cluster distances, or
optimal representation of every object by thecentroid object of the cluster to which it isassigned, or optimal fit by a mixture probability
model). Otherwise, this also implies that it isparticularly
importantforbenchmarking
clustering to define properly the clustering
problem that a method aims to solve, byspecifying as precisely as possible what kinds ofclusters are of interest. With this specification inplace, appropriate simulation setups, datasets forbenchmarking, and competing existing clustering
methods can be more systematically chosen.
That being said, datasets with known classes areoften used for benchmarking clustering in asimilar manner as in supervised classification.
Sometimes these are simulated from mixture
probability models with clusters defined byhomogeneous
mixturecomponents,
andsometimes these are real datasets in which the
problem of interest was originally supervisedclassification. But in all of these cases, it would
be conceivable that clusterings other than thoseassumed to be “true” could be valid as well. In
fact, clusterings different from the “known” ones
could sometimes be of even greater scientificinterest, because cluster analysis is used in reality
to find clusterings that are not yet known. For thisreason, it is also of interest to use datasets forbenchmarking that represent genuine clustering
problems, i.e., in which the “true” clustering is
not yet known.
Aim and Setup
The aim of the IFCS Cluster Benchmark Data
Repository is to stimulate better practice inbenchmarking (performance comparison of
methods) for cluster analysis by providing avariety of well-documented, high-quality datasets
and simulation routines1 for use in practicalbenchmarking. The overarching principle is thatcluster benchmarking does not simply mean thatmethods are ranked in a one-dimensional manner,
but rather that their advantages and shortcomings
are characterized thoroughly against a more
precise definition of what kind of clustering could
be of interest, and the characteristics of thedatasets to which the methods would be applied.
The IFCS Cluster Benchmark Data Repository(http://ifcs.boku.ac.at/repository/)
offersaplatform for all kinds of datasets on whichclustering may be of interest, including standard
multivariate data, data with mixed types ofvariables, similarity and dissimilarity data, andvarious kinds of structured data such as timeseries data, regression data, spatial data, symbolic
data, graph data. The datasets may be offeredwith or without given “true” clusterings. A
particular feature of the repository is that every
datasetcomeswithcomprehensive
documentation, including information on thespecific nature of the clustering problem in thedataset, and the characteristics that useful clusters
should fulfill, with scientific justification. In
cases where “true” clusters are provided, suchinformation is still required in order to understandproperly what it means that a certain clustering
method performs well or badly, taking into
account the possibility that clusterings other than
the given one can also be good in some sense. In
cases where "true" clusters are not provided, thegiven information can be used to evaluate theperformance of clustering methods by othermeans than looking at misclassifications, forexample based on quality criteria that can becomputed from the clustered data, or based onother external variables or information if
provided.

1

The section of the repository that will contain simulation
routines is still under construction.

Call for Contributions
The IFCS Task Force on Benchmarking (AnneLaure Boulesteix, Rainer Dangl, Nema Dean,
Isabelle Guyon, Christian Hennig, Fritz Leisch,Doug Steinley, and Iven Van Mechelen) are most
happy to invite now all researchers interested inclustering and classification to contribute data
sets to the IFCS Cluster Benchmark Data
Repository (at http://ifcs.boku.ac.at/repository/).
If you click on the link “Contribute a Data Set”
on the website, you will immediately be guided to
instructions and a questionnaire to contribute data
along with (required and optional) metadata
information. On the website you may also inspecta few examples of data sets that are alreadyavailable. As soon as the repository includes a
sufficient number of data sets, the Task Force will
undertake several initiatives to make it highly
visible to the international scientific community
as a point of reference for benchmarking incluster analysis and as a catalyst for better
practices in this area.
Iven Van Mechelen

Upcoming Conferences and Meetings
February 2016
JCS 34th Annual Meeting, February 29 March 1, Tokai University, Takanawa Campus.
http://www.bunrui.jp/
March 2016
GfKl
Data Science Society 40th Annual
Meeting, March 14-18, at the Fourth Joint
Statistical
MeetingoftheDeutscheArbeitsgemeinschaft Statistik “Statistics under
one Umbrella”, Georg-August University
Göttingen(DAGStat2016).
http://www.unigoettingen.de/de/485701.html
JOCLAD 2016, March 31 - April 2, Universidadede Évora. http://www.clad.pt/
June 2016
The Classification Society meeting, June 1-4 at
the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO.
www.classification-society.org

Looking Ahead to IFCS Newsletter
Number 53
Contributions for the forthcoming issue of the
IFCS newsletter should be sent to PaulMcNicholas, IFCS Publication Officer, at
mcnicholas@math.mcmaster.ca by March 24.
Plain text or Word files are preferred.
Thanks!
Paul McNicholas
IFCS Publication Officer