Guest Editorial for Special Section on BIOKDD

The International Workshop on Data Mining in Bioinformatics (BIOKDD), held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) for 11 years, has successfully established a tradition of providing a platform for the presentation and discussion of advances in data mining techniques that primarily target biological data. In 2012, the workshop was held in Beijing, China, and BIOKDD continued the tradition of bringing together data mining researchers and life scientists, emphasizing novel problems with various types of biological data. This special section features extended versions of three papers that were presented in BIKODD.