The advent of high-speed, affordable computers in the last two decades has given a new boost to the nonparametric way of thinking. Classical nonparametric procedures, such as function smoothing, suddenly lost their abstract flavour as they became practically implementable. In addition, many previously unthinkable possibilities became mainstream; prime examples include the bootstrap and resampling methods, wavelets and nonlinear smoothers, graphical methods, data mining, bioinformatics, as well as the more recent algorithmic approaches such as bagging and boosting. This volume is a collection...