VII Workshop on Computational Data Analysis and Numerical Methods

Abstract

Dear participants, colleagues and friends, it is a great honour and a privilege to give you all a warmest welcome to the VII Workshop on Computational Data Analysis and Numerical Methods (VII WCDANM), which is organized by the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar (located in the center of Portugal in the beautiful city of Tomar), with the support of some Portuguese research centers, hoping that the final result may exceed the expectations of the participants, sponsors and organizers. Due to the worldwide pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus, for the first time, this meeting will be transmitted through videoconference (webminar). Nevertheless, the important contributions of Adélia Sequeira (University of Lisbon, Portugal), Sílvia Barbeiro (University of Coimbra, Portugal), Malay Banerjee (Indian Instituto of Techonology Kampur, India) and Indranhil Ghosh (University of North Carolina at Wilmington, USA) as Plenary Speakers, the high scientific level of oral and poster presentations and an active audience will certainly contribute to the success of the meeting. Part of the accepted papers (theoretical and applied) by the VII WCDANM involve big data, data mining, data science and machine learning, in different areas of research, some giving emphasis to coronavirus. A very special thanks to this small, yet important, scientific community, since this event could not be possible without any of these essential and complementary parts. This year, there is also the possibility to attend a course on ŞModeling Partial Least Squares Structural Equations (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLSŤ given by Christian M. Ringle ((TUHH) Hamburg University of Technology, Germany), who kindly and readily accepted our invitation and to whom we are very grateful. A special acknowledgment is also due to the Members of the Executive, Scientific and Organizing Committees. In particular, Anuj Mubayi (Arizona StateUniversity,USA),MilanStehlík(Johannes KeplerUniversity,Austria), AnaNata,IsabelPitacasandManuelaFernandes(hostsfromthePolytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal), A. Manuela Gonçalves (University of Minho, Portugal), Teresa Oliveira (Aberta University) and Fernando Carapau (University of Évora, Portugal) have been relentless in search for a balanced, broad and interesting program, having achieved an excellent result. For the third consecutive year, the Journal of Applied Statistics (Taylor & Francis) and Neural Computing and Applications (Springer) are also associated to the event, being extremely important in the dissemination of the scientific results achieved at the meeting. Given the above, it is a pleasure to be ”together” with all of you in this web conference, hoping it may provide an intellectual stimulus and an opportunity for the scientific community to jointly work and disseminate scientific research, namely presenting approaches that may contribute to the solution of the pandemic we are experiencing in the expectation that the present might be past in the near future!