Overview of the Relational Analysis approach in Data-Mining and Multi-criteria Decision Making

Abstract

In this chapter we introduce a general framework called the Relational Analysis approachand its related contributions and applications in the fields of data analysis, data mining andmulti-criteria decision making. This approach was initiated by J.F. Marcotorchino and P.Michaud at the end of the 70’s and has generated many research activities. However, theaspects of this framework that we would like to focus on are of a theoretical kind. Indeed, weaimed at recalling the background and the basics of this framework, the unifying results andthe modeling contributions that it has allowed to achieve. Besides, the main tasks that we areinterested in are the ranking aggregation problem, the clustering problem and the block seri-ation problem. Those problems are combinatorial ones and the computational considerationsof such tasks in the context of the RA methodology will not be covered. However, amongthe list of references that we give throughout this chapter, they are numerous articles that theinterested reader could consult to this end.In order to introduce the Relational Analysis approach (denoted “RA” in the rest of the doc-ument), let us first introduce several problems that one could encounter in the data anal-ysis field. To this end, let us consider a data table concerning a set of