I am very much honored to have been asked to write preface for the conference proceeding, and want to take this opportunity to summarize my thoughts and share with readers.

This conference proceeding (FAIA) contains papers submitted for the 2015 International Conference on Fuzzy System and Data Mining, held in Shanghai, December 12–15, 2015 (FSDM2015, the conference that I helped reviewing papers) which focuses on Fuzzy theory and Data mining research and their application in interdisciplinary fields.

All papers are carefully reviewed by program committee members and takes into account the breadth and depth of research topics, which include Fuzzy Theory, Algorithm and System, and Data Mining. It also includes the applications and interdisciplinary field of fuzzy logic and data mining. The application domain covers geography, biology, economic, medicine, energy industry, social science, logistics, transportation, industrial and production engineering and computer science.

Fuzzy set theory is very suitable to model the uncertain duration in process simulation, as well as define the fuzzy goals and fuzzy constrains for decision making. Here, fuzzy set theory and its application in industry engineering and social science is one of main topics, with an emphasis on system diagnosis, rule induction, process simulation/control and decision making. Also, the increasing large data sets from many application domains together with new types of unstructured data, have posed new challenges to data analytics research. In order to tackle the challenge, this proceeding considerately brings in papers on solving practical problems by intelligence algorithm (for example, evolution algorithm, neural network), statistical analysis, classification and clustering, association rule learning, etc. Moreover, these papers not only propose new algorithm or improve existing algorithm, but also reflect the frontier in the data mining research. Another interesting observation is that the fast growth of data in economics and social science nowadays has encouraged the development of data driven algorithms too.

Every paper provides authors' unique insights from their research field. By collecting these insights and experiences together into this proceeding, researchers can have an idea how fuzzy theory and data mining principle is applied to various fields, and practitioners can have deeper understanding on the theory side of algorithms. I truly believe that both researchers and practitioners will be inspired by the wide range of real world solutions collected here.

In the end, we would like to thank all the reviewers for spending time help reviewing papers, and all the authors for their participation for FSDM2015 and contributions to this proceeding.

Gang Chen

Samsung Electronics America,

Mountain View, CA, USA