Complex Methods Applied to Data Analysis, Processing, and Visualisation

Abstract

The amount of data available every day is not only enormous but growing at an exponential rate. Over the last ten years there has been an increasing interest in using complex methods to analyse and visualise massive datasets, gathered from very different sources and including many different features: social networks, surveillance systems, smart cities, medical diagnosis systems, business information, cyberphysical systems, and digital media data. Nowadays, there are a large number of researchers working in complex methods to process, analyse, and visualise all this information, which can be applied to a wide variety of open problems in different domains. This special issue presents a collection of research papers addressing theoretical, methodological, and practical aspects of data processing, focusing on algorithms that use complex methods (e.g., chaos, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks, and evolutionary game theory) in a variety of domains (e.g., software engineering, digital media data, bioinformatics, health care, imaging and video, social networks, and natural language processing). A total of 27 papers were received from different research fields, but sharing a common feature: they presented complex systems that process, analyse, and visualise large amounts of data. After the review process, 8 papers were accepted for publication (around 30% of acceptance ratio).