Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2017, held in Guilin, China, in October/November 2017. The 65 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 110 submissions. These papers provided a sample of latest research outcomes in data engineering and automated learning, from methodologies, frameworks and techniques to applications. In addition to various topics such as evolutionary algorithms, deep learning neural networks, probabilistic modelling, particle swarm intelligence, big data analytics, and applications in image recognition, regression, classification, clustering, medical and biological modelling and prediction, text processing and social media analysis.