Abstract Summary: Pvclust is an add-on package for a statistical software R to assess the uncertainty in hierarchical cluster analysis. Pvclust can be used easily for general statistical problems, such as DNA microarray analysis, to perform the bootstrap analysis of clustering, which has been popular in phylogenetic analysis. Pvclust calculates probability values (p-values) for each cluster using bootstrap resampling techniques. Two types of p-values are available: approximately unbiased (AU) p-value and bootstrap probability (BP) value. Multiscale bootstrap resampling is used for the calculation of AU p-value, which has superiority in bias over BP value calculated by the ordinary bootstrap resampling. In addition the computation time can be enormously decreased with parallel computing option. Availability: The program is freely distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL) and can directly be installed from CRAN (), the official R package archive. The instruction and program source code are available at Contact: [email protected]

This paper proposes a new demand forecasting method using a neural network and Fourier transform. In this method, time series data of sales results considered as a combination of frequency are transformed into several frequency data. They are identified from objective indexes that consist of product properties or economic indicators and so forth. This method is efficient for demand forecasting aimed at new products that have no historical data.