This volume presents 70 carefully selected papers from a major joint event: the 8th International Conference on Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR 2016) and the 8th International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks (CASoN 2016). SoCPaR-CASoN 2016, which was organized by the Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIR Labs), USA and Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), India and held at the VIT on December 19-21, 2016. It brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to share their experiences and exchange new ideas on all interdisciplinary areas of soft computing and pattern recognition, as well as intelligent methods applied to social networks. This book is a valuable resource for practicing engineers/scientists and researchers working in the field of soft computing, pattern recognition and social networks.

Big Data analytics is the complex process of examining big data to uncover information such as correlations, hidden patterns, trends and user and customer preferences, to allow organizations and businesses to make more informed decisions. These methods and technologies have become ubiquitous in all fields of science, engineering, business and management due to the rise of data-driven models as well as data engineering developments using parallel and distributed computational analytics frameworks, data and algorithm parallelization, and GPGPU programming. However, there remain potential issues that need to be addressed to enable big data processing and analytics in real time. In the first volume of this comprehensive two-volume handbook, the authors present several methodologies to support Big Data analytics including database management, processing frameworks and architectures, data lakes, query optimization strategies, towards real-time data processing, data stream analytics, Fog and Edge computing, and Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. The second volume is dedicated to a wide range of applications in secure data storage, privacy-preserving, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Internet of Things (IoTs), behaviour analytics, traffic predictions, gender based classification on e-commerce data, recommender systems, Big Data regression with Apache Spark, visual sentiment analysis, wavelet Neural Network via GPU, stock market movement predictions, and financial reporting. The two-volume work is aimed at providing a unique platform for researchers, engineers, developers, educators and advanced students in the field of Big Data analytics.

Big Data analytics is the complex process of examining big data to uncover information such as correlations, hidden patterns, trends and user and customer preferences, to allow organizations and businesses to make more informed decisions. These methods and technologies have become ubiquitous in all fields of science, engineering, business and management due to the rise of data-driven models as well as data engineering developments using parallel and distributed computational analytics frameworks, data and algorithm parallelization, and GPGPU programming. However, there remain potential issues that need to be addressed to enable big data processing and analytics in real time. In the first volume of this comprehensive two-volume handbook, the authors present several methodologies to support Big Data analytics including database management, processing frameworks and architectures, data lakes, query optimization strategies, towards real-time data processing, data stream analytics, Fog and Edge computing, and Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. The second volume is dedicated to a wide range of applications in secure data storage, privacy-preserving, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Internet of Things (IoTs), behaviour analytics, traffic predictions, gender based classification on e-commerce data, recommender systems, Big Data regression with Apache Spark, visual sentiment analysis, wavelet Neural Network via GPU, stock market movement predictions, and financial reporting. The two-volume work is aimed at providing a unique platform for researchers, engineers, developers, educators and advanced students in the field of Big Data analytics.