Book excerpt: This volume presents the most recent applied and methodological issues in stochastic modeling and data analysis. The contributions cover various fields such as stochastic processes and applications, data analysis methods and techniques, Bayesian methods, biostatistics, econometrics, sampling, linear and nonlinear models, networks and queues, survival analysis, and time series. The volume presents new results with potential for solving real-life problems and provides novel methods for solving these problems by analyzing the relevant data. The use of recent advances in different fields is emphasized, especially new optimization and statistical methods, data warehouse, data mining and knowledge systems, neural computing, and bioinformatics.