Gerard Govaert is Professor at the University of Technology of Compiegne, France. He is also a member of the CNRS Laboratory Heudiasyc (Heuristic and diagnostic of complex systems).His research interests include latent structure modeling, model selection, model-based cluster analysis, block clustering and statistical pattern recognition. He is one of the authors of the MIXMOD (MIXture MODelling) software.

The first part of this book is devoted to methods seeking relevant dimensions of data. The variables thus obtained provide a synthetic description which often results in a graphical representation of the data. After a general presentation of the discriminating analysis, the second part is devoted to clustering methods which constitute another method, often complementary to the methods described in the first part, to synthesize and to analyze the data. The book concludes by examining the links existing between data mining and data analysis.