In three chapters, the three fundamental aspects of a theoretical background, the representation of data and their connection to algorithms, and particular challenging applications are considered. Topics discussed concern a theoretical investigation and foundation of prototype based learning algorithms, the development and extension of models to directions such as general data structures and the application for the domain of medicine and biology.

Similarity based methods find widespread applications in diverse application domains, including biomedical problems, but also in remote sensing, geoscience or other technical domains. The presentations give a good overview about important research results in similarity-based learning, whereby the character of overview articles with references to correlated research articles makes the contributions particularly suited for a first reading concerning these topics.