Edwin Diday is Emeritus Professor at Paris-Dauphine University-PSL. He helped to introduce the symbolic data analysis paradigm and the dynamic clustering method (opening the path to local models), as well as pyramidal clustering for spatial representation of overlapping clusters. Rong Guan is Associate Professor at the School of Statistics and Mathematics, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing. Her research covers complex and symbolic data analysis and financial distress diagnosis. Gilbert Saporta is Emeritus Professor at Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, France. His current research focuses on functional data analysis and clusterwise and sparse methods. He is Honorary President of the French Statistical Society. Huiwen Wang is Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing. Her research covers dimension reduction, PLS regression, symbolic data analysis, compositional data analysis, functional data analysis and statistical modeling methods for mixed data.