As the amount of information recorded and stored electronically grows ever larger, it becomes increasingly useful, if not essential, to develop better and more efficient ways to summarize and extract information from these large, multivariate data sets. The field of classification does just that-investigates sets of "objects" to see if they can be summarized into a small number of classes comprising similar objects.Researchers have made great strides in the field over the last twenty years, and classification is no longer perceived as being concerned solely with exploratory analyses. The...