Standard statistical methods do not have the power or flexibility to understand the very large datasets, and symbolic data analysis techniques have been developed to extract knowledge from data. Symbolic data methods differ from data mining, for example, because rather than identifying points of interest in the data, symbolic data methods allow users to build data models and make predictions about future events. This book is the result of team work fa pan-European project led by Edwin Diday following 3 years of work sponsored by Eurostat.