Big Data Analytics is on the rise in the last years of the current decade. Data are overwhelming the computation capacity of high performance servers. Cloud, grid, edge and fog computing are a few examples of the current hype. Computational Intelligence offers two faces to deal with the development of models: on the one hand, the crisp approach, which considers for every variable an exact value and, on the other hand, the fuzzy focus, which copes with values between two boundaries and is often expressed with words providing an order among the categories.

Fuzzy Systems and Data Mining (FSDM) is a consolidated international conference which is held yearly, comprising four main groups of topics: a) Fuzzy theory, algorithm and system, covering issues like modelling, stability, concepts, formalization; b) Fuzzy application, including different kinds of processing as well as hardware and architectures with applicability, among others, to recognition, vehicle industry and multimedia; c) The interdisciplinary field of fuzzy logic and data mining, encompassing applications in any branch of engineering (electrical, manufacture, industrial, chemical, biomedical and health sector) as well as management and environment; and d) Data mining, providing new trends in scalable, parallel and distributed algorithms. Mining on graphs, web and data streams are very frequent nowadays without losing the point of view from visualization, privacy and security. By its part, sport data mining is gaining ground due to the importance not only to predict the outcome of any sport event, but also to match the exact result, which is undoubtedly essential to the betting system.

This edition is marked since the fourth anniversary is being celebrated and hence the FSDM series consolidation. This conference was first held in Shanghai in 2015 and has taken place in a different city every year. Up to now, two countries have hosted the conference. For the upcoming year Japan will be the destination. Following the great success of FSDM 2015, held in Shanghai (China), the second edition in the FSDM series took place in Macao (China), the third edition was hosted by National Dong Hwa University in Hualien, Taiwan (China) with the result of attracting many people from all over the world, and also to have shown different landscapes of this country. The fourth edition of the series (FSDM 2018) has come to Bangkok (Thailand), as a forum for experts, researchers, academics and industry people to introduce the last advances in the field of Fuzzy Sets and Data Mining. This new venue represents a movement from the Eastern part to the Southeast part of Asia. Thailand has five places declared as UNESCO World Heritage Sites from 1991 to 2005 according to the cultural criterion. Particularly, the most recent in the sense of its recognition is Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai Forest Complex. Khao Yai is along the route from Bangkok to Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat). Thailand has Thai as official language and four spoken languages.

This volume includes the papers accepted and presented at the 4th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Data Mining (FSDM 2018), held on 16–19 November 2018 in Bangkok, Thailand. All papers were carefully reviewed by program committee members, bearing in mind the quality, novelty, breadth and depth of the research themes which fall inside the FSDM scope. FSDM 2018 was a reference and outstanding conference which attracted three remarkable keynote speakers: Dr. A. Fazel Famili from Canada, Prof. Sheng-Lung Peng from Taiwan and Prof. Hari Mohan Srivastava from Canada who is chairing a position as Emeritus Professor. Hence, the conference has enjoyed three keynotes from overseas. For the first time, invited speakers have been arranged into two major groups depending on the field of interest such as Fuzzy Systems and Data Mining. Previous proceedings have been published in the prestigious book series Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (FAIA) by IOS Press and are as follows: Vol. 281, Vol. 293 and Vol. 299 for FSDM 2015, FSDM 2016 and FSDM 2017, respectively. The current FAIA volume contains the selected contributions from FSDM 2018. If you have contributed to the FSDM conference before or even in this edition, we would like to see you on board again. Otherwise, if you have not submitted any paper to FSDM, we would like to invite you to prepare a good contribution and visit Japan where it is planned to hold FSDM 2019.

I am very glad to inform you that this year FSDM has received more than double the number of submissions of FSDM 2017, in total: 347. After an intense discussion stage, the committee, which included many experts, decided to accept 114 papers, which represents an acceptance rate of 32.85%. The profile of the authors is very remarkable and the number of full professors who have contributed is very high. As a follow-up of the conference, some special issues in well-regarded journals like Intelligent Data Analysis, Journal of Information Science and Engineering and Journal of Nonlinear and Convex Analysis are scheduled to be published; this is an important leap as the number of journal issues is increasing yearly. In previous years, a special issue with the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems was published.

I am pleased to say thanks to all the keynote and invited speakers, and the authors who made the effort to prepare at least a contribution for the conference. Furthermore, we are very grateful to everyone, especially the program committee members and reviewers, who devoted time to assess the papers. It is an honour to continue with the publication of these proceedings in the outstanding series FAIA by IOS Press. Our particular thanks and regards also go to J. Breuker, N. Guarino, J.N. Kok, R. López de Mántaras, J. Liu, R. Mizoguchi, M. Musen, S.K. Pal and N. Zhong, who are the FAIA series editors, for supporting this conference.

Last but not least, I hope you enjoyed your stay in Bangkok, in the venue as well as its surroundings which are located in the heart of the city. The climate in Bangkok has three variations: cool, hot and rainy. Technically, November is not inside the rainy season, which ends in October. The rainy days in November are around five and the climate is changing to give place to the cool season from December. To sum up, November is a hybrid month combining slightly milder temperatures than October, a few days of rain although with many sunshine hours, and the average temperature, according to the historical series, is very likely to be between 24 and 32 degrees Celsius.

September 2018

Antonio J. Tallón-Ballesteros

University of Seville (Spain)

Seville city, Spain