| Abstract: | The objective of this paper is to provide an independent evaluation of the nature and interpretation of ships' physical condition data generated by the USN Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV). The substantive context is the classification of ships in terms of material condition and/or readiness based on scores pertaining to individual line elements within each ship. In order to account for multi-dimensional measures of each ship, clustering procedures are employed to evaluate existing ship classification systems and to indicate other possibilities. |
