Introduction to the special issue Towards Spatial Data Science

This is the editorial letter for the Special Issue dedicated to the conference Spatial Statistics 2019 Towards Spatial Data Science held in Sitges (Spain) from July 10 to 13, 2019. This fifth international conference on Spatial Statistics was run under the theme Towards Spatial Data Science with the aim to honour the emerging field of Data Science with a focus on spatial and spatio-temporal methods and real-data problems. The conference was home for more than 250 delegates from about 50 countries worldwide, and the conference included four workshops, more than 100 oral presentations, and nine widely recognised keynote speakers. This special issue summarises a selection of the main contributions presented at this workshop, related to spatial and spatio-temporal point processes, geostatistics, machine learning and neural networks, disease mapping, extremes and information and complexity. The methodology is embedded in a large number of applications from the environment, traffic and crime, health and socio-economical problems that are the true motivation and justification of this new field.