Italian contributions on some recent research topics in cluster analysis

The paper presents a selective view of the issues that are attracting the interest of Italian statisticians working on clustering methods and applications. It does not aim at providing a comprehensive overview of the wealth of methods developed in Italy on the selected topics: indeed, it focuses on methods dealing with quantitative data and, in this context, only on the most recent literature. The fil rouge is given by the developments which have been inspired in quantitative data clustering by the complex nature of the data nowadays arising in a broad range of applications