Next generation informatics for big data in precision medicine era

The rise of data-intensive biology, advances in informatics technology, and changes in the way health care is delivered has created an compelling opportunity to allow us investigate biomedical questions in the context of "big data" and develop knowledge systems to support precision medicine. To promote such data mining and informatics technology development in precision medicine, we hosted two international informatics workshops in 2014: 1) the first workshop on Data Mining in Biomedical informatics and Healthcare, in conjunction with the 18th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2014), and 2) the first workshop on Translational biomedical and clinical informatics, in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on Systems Biology and the 4th Translational Bioinformatics Conference (ISB/TBC 2014). This thematic issue of BioData Mining presents a series of selected papers from these two international workshops, aiming to address the data mining needs in the informatics field due to the deluge of "big data" generated by next generation biotechnologies such as next generation sequencing, metabolomics, and proteomics, as well as the structured and unstructured biomedical and healthcare data from electronic health records. We are grateful for the BioData Mining's willingness to produce this forward-looking thematic issue.