The Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (IDEAL) conf- ence series began in 1998 in Hong Kong, when the world started to experience information and data explosion and to demand for better, intelligent meth- ologies and techniques. It has since developed, enjoyed success in recent years, and become a unique annual international forum dedicated to emerging topics and technologies in intelligent data analysis and mining, knowledge discovery, automated learning and agent technology, as well as interdisciplinary appli- tions, especially bioinformatics. These techniques are common...