Data science in Asia (for PAKDD 2016)

This special issue on Data Science in Asia consists of six selected papers from the 20th Pacific-Asia Conference on KnowledgeDiscovery andDataMining (PAKDD2016) held in Auckland, New Zealand, in April 2016. The Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) is a leading international conference in the areas of knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD). It provides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas, including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, databases, statistics, knowledge engineering, visualization, decisionmaking systems and emerging applications. PAKDD 2016 received 307 submissions. Of these, 91 papers were selected for the conference program and proceedings, resulting in an acceptance rate below 30%. The six papers presented in this special issue have been selected from amongst the best papers accepted in PAKDD 2016, in terms of their technical contributions and paper presentation. Authors of the papers have been invited to extend and improve their conference versions significantly, based on feedback from the conference, and comments and suggestions from additional reviewers. The quality of these papers is a testament to the rapid growth of data science research in the Asia-Pacific region.