Big Data

Big data has been an enabler for innovation, reconstruction, and advancement of most sectors of our society, and it's receiving continuous and growing attention from researchers and practitioners in academia, industry, and government. There are, however, still lots of challenges spanning from theoretical foundations, systems, and technology to data policy and standards. This special issue focuses on how big data cuts across systems and applications arenas, and the guest editors' introduction describes the five articles they selected out of 30 submitted to cover a wide spectrum of interesting topics, including feature selection for big data analytics, astronomical image analysis, large-scale network prediction, online URL filtering, and massive transaction clustering.