Hi There aree many approaches and hopefulyl you will hear from several people describing their favorite. I would suggest you look at recursive partitioning, also called tree models or CART. If you are familair with the R statistical software (freeware that can be downloaded from http://www.r-project.org/) there is an addon llibrary called rpart that can be used. Good luck Bill Shannon Washington University in St. Louis Arnaud Trollé <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Hello, I'd like to cluster categorical data (3 categories) by means of a partitioning method; I'm quite a beginner in that field and I would need to be enlightened. From a bibliographic review I carried out about that topic, it appeared to me that a method is often used :the k-modes method. From her/his experience, could anyone confirm or deny that it is the case ? If denied, which method could be more "powerful" ? Thanks in advance. Best Regards. Arnaud. PhD Student in Acoustics. Lyon, France. ---------------------------------------------- CLASS-L list. Instructions: http://www.classification-society.org/csna/lists.html#class-l ---------------------------------------------- CLASS-L list. Instructions: http://www.classification-society.org/csna/lists.html#class-l