This monograph focuses on the application of the solution strategy known as branch-and-bound to problems of combinatorial data analysis. Combinatorial data analysis problems typically require either the sel- tion of a subset of objects from a larger (master) set, the grouping of a collection of objects into mutually exclusive and exhaustive subsets, or the sequencing of objects. To obtain verifiably optimal solutions for this class of problems, we must evaluate (either explicitly or implicitly) all feasible solutions. Unfortunately, the number of feasible solutions for problems of...