The author has written an accessible book presenting the central issues and placing particular emphasis on comparison, performance assessment and how to match method to application. He reviews the different approaches and guides researchers (and the huge class of users and potential users) to suitable classes of techniques. He points the way to more detailed study in "further reading" sections in each chapter.

David John Hand OBE FBA is a British statistician. His research interests include multivariate statistics, classification methods, pattern recognition, the computational statistics and the foundations of statistics.