Transformations in many fields are enabled by rapid advances in our ability to acquire and generate data. The bottleneck to discovery is now our ability to analyze and make sense of heterogeneous, noisy, streaming, and often massive datasets. Extracting knowledge or insights from this abundance of data lies at the heart of 21st century discovery, which can be used to inform decisions, coordinate activities, optimize processes, improve products and services, as well as enhance productivity and innovation across a wide range of business and scientific problems.

Data science is the practice of deriving insights from data, enabled by statistical modeling, computational methods, interactive visual analysis, and domain-driven problem solving. Data science draws from methodology developed in such fields as applied mathematics, statistics, machine learning, data management, visualization, and HCI. It drives discoveries in business, economy, biology, medicine, environmental science, the physical sciences, the humanities and social sciences, and beyond.

Visualization is an integral part of data science, and essential to enable sophisticated analysis of data. After three highly successful events, the fourth Symposium on Visualization in Data Science (VDS) will again be held at IEEE VIS 2018 in Berlin, Germany. VDS will bring together domain scientists and methods researchers (including visualization, usability and HCI, data management, statistics, machine learning, and software engineering) to discuss common interests, talk about practical issues, and identify open research problems in visualization in data science.