EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing

It is obvious that we are living in a data deluge era, evidenced by the phenomenon that enormous amount of data have been being continually generated at unprecedented and ever increasing scales. Large-scale data sets are collected and studied in numerous domains, from engineering sciences to social networks, commerce, biomolecular research, and security [1]. Particularly, digital data, generated from a variety of digital devices, are growing at astonishing rates. According to [2], in 2011, digital information has grown nine times in volume in just 5 years and its amount in the world will reach 35 trillion gigabytes by 2020 [3]. Therefore, the term "Big Data" was coined to capture the profound meaning of this data explosion trend. To clarify what the big data refers to, several good surveys have been presented recently and each of them views the big data from different perspectives, including challenges and opportunities [4], background and research status [5], and analytics platforms [6].