In this age of BigData, there is increasing interest in analysing data emanating from heterogenous sources. Developing statistical and computational techniques for such data analysis problems is the focus of the emerging area of Data Science. The special section in this issue of Sadhana tries to bring together some of the recent research work in this important area. About 40-odd papers were submitted for this special section and after a rigorous review process, seven papers are selected. The papers deal with interesting problems arising in a variety of domains which include healthcare (Nandhini & Sivanandam; Geetharamani & Lakshmi Balasubramanian), information retrieval (Vennigston et al), handwriting recognition (Singh et al), network analytics (Saad et al; Priyadarshini et al; Vishnu & Balaraman Ravindran). Nandhini & Sivanandam investigate the problem of improving diagnosis accuracy in healthcare. Singh et al investigate the problem of feature selection for Hindi numeral recognition. Geetharamani & Lakshmi Balasubramanian review the problem of automatic segmentation of blood vessels from retinal fundus, an important problem in ophthalmology. Vennigston et al discuss how association graph-based representations can improve Information retrieval accuracy. Saad et al investigate the problem of anomaly detection in LAN networks in a big University setting. Priyadarshini et al examine the problem of privacy preserving data-mining. Vishnu & Balaraman Ravindran explore scaling up of cooperative game theory driven node centrality algorithms, an important construct in network analytics, for BigData.

We thank all the authors, reviewers and the editorial team for their support in putting together this special section. We hope that this special section would contribute towards heightened interest in Data Science.

September 2015

C BHATTACHARYA,                            J SAKETHA NATH,

Department of Computer Science           Department of Computer Science

and Automation,                                     and Engineering,

Indian Institute of Science,                     Indian Institute of Technology Bombay,

Bangalore 560012, India                         Powai, Mumbai 400076, India

e-mail: chiru@csa.iisc.ernet.in                e-mail: saketh.nath@gmail.com

                                        (Guest Editors)