Advantages and Pitfalls of Pattern Recognition presents various methods of pattern recognition and classification, useful to geophysicists, geochemists, geologists, geographers, data analysts, and educators and students of geosciences. Scientific and technological progress has dramatically improved the knowledge of our planet with huge amounts of digital data available in various fields of Earth Sciences, such as geology, geophysics, and geography. This has led to a new perspective of data analysis, requiring specific techniques that take several features into consideration rather than single parameters. Pattern recognition techniques offer a suitable key for processing and extracting useful information from the data of multivariate analysis. This book explores both supervised and unsupervised pattern recognition techniques, while providing insight into their application.