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ABSTRACT

In many applied sciences there is often a problem of revealing a structure underlying

a given collection of objects (situations, measurements, observations, etc.).

A specific problem of this type is that of determining a hierarchy of meaningful

subcategories in such a collection. This problem has been studied intensively in

the area of cluster analysis. The methods developed there, however, formulate

subcategories ('clusters') solely on the basis of pairwise 'similarity' (or 'proximity')

of objects, and ignore the issue of the 'meaning' of the clusters obtained. The

methods do not provide any description of the clusters obtained. This paper

presents a method which constructs a hierarchy of subcategories, such that an

appropriately generalized description of each subcategory is a single conjunctive

statement involving attributes of objects and has a simple conceptual interpretation.

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