Foreword: Intelligent data analysis

Nowadays there has been an enormous increase in the amount of available data sets of any kind. As a result, the need of applying techniques to analyze and extract information of those data has become a crucial task. The intelligent analysis of data opens a new way of addressing problems impossible to deal with so far. Intelligent Data Analysis (IDL) is concerned with the application of techniques coming from very different areas such as statistics, artificial intelligence, data mining, computational statistics, machine learning, optimization, dynamic programming; to real-world data analysis problems [1]. In fact, IDL is anew has emerged as a branch of research to avoid the danger of drowning in information, but starving for knowledge, and a considerable number of methods and software tools have been developed to solve data analysis problems [2]. This special issue is devoted to recent research findings in the field of IDL. The special issue is based on substantially extended and updated papers presented at the IEEE 11th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA-2011), that held in Cordoba, Spain during November 22 to 24, 2011 [3]. The papers besides being selected based on their originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of exposition, they are also intended to bring new research findings in the field of IDL. These papers were selected by the scientific program committee and revised before undergoing a rigorous period of peer-review. Contributions of these papers are summarized as follows.