This volume contains papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Arti?cial Intelligence (MDAI 2005), held in Tsukuba, Japan, July 25-27. This conference follows MDAI 2004 (held in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain), the proceedings of which were also published in the LNAI series (Vol. 3131). The aim of this conference was to provide a forum for researchers to discuss about theory and tools for modeling decisions, as well as applications that - compass decision-making processes and information fusion techniques. In this second edition, special focus was given to...

Recently many researchers are working on cluster analysis as a main tool for exploratory data analysis and data mining. A notable feature is that specialists in di?erent ?elds of sciences are considering the tool of data clustering to be useful. A major reason is that clustering algorithms and software are ?exible in thesensethatdi?erentmathematicalframeworksareemployedinthealgorithms and a user can select a suitable method according to his application. Moreover clusteringalgorithmshavedi?erentoutputsrangingfromtheolddendrogramsof agglomerativeclustering to more recent self-organizingmaps....

This book discusses recent theoretical developments in agglomerative hierarchical clustering. The general understanding of agglomerative hierarchical clustering is that its theory was completed long ago and there is no room for further methodological studies, at least in its fundamental structure. This book has been planned counter to that view: it will show that there are possibilities for further theoretical studies and they will be not only for methodological interests but also for usefulness in real applications. When compared with traditional textbooks, the present book has several...