This book is comprised of the presentations delivered at the 25th ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium held at the Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, on June 12-15, 2016. This symposium attracted more than 700 statisticians and data scientists working in academia, government, and industry from all over the world. The theme of this conference was the “Challenge of Big Data and Applications of Statistics,” in recognition of the advent of big data era, and the symposium offered opportunities for learning, receiving inspirations from old research ideas and for developing new ones, and for promoting further research collaborations in the data sciences. The invited contributions addressed rich topics closely related to big data analysis in the data sciences, reflecting recent advances and major challenges in statistics, business statistics, and biostatistics. Subsequently, the six editors selected 19 high-quality presentations and invited the speakers to prepare full chapters for this book, which showcases new methods in statistics and data sciences, emerging theories, and case applications from statistics, data science and interdisciplinary fields. The topics covered in the book are timely and have great impact on data sciences, identifying important directions for future research, promoting advanced statistical methods in big data science, and facilitating future collaborations across disciplines and between theory and practice.
