Introduction to the special issue on scale and spatial analytics.

Review of the special issue papers The eight research papers included in this special issue cover a breath of literature review, new methodology, applications, and perspectives of scale. Wang and Wu discuss computational challenges in modeling spatial and temporal dimensions of big data (data captured at fine spatial and temporal scales) in discrete-choice models. To achieve this, the authors collected and reconciled multiple years of geospatial data related to urbanization and surveys of children's health from multiple sources and at different scales, into a uniform spatial frame to exploit their correlations. Following these methodological discussions, this special issue includes three interesting application papers that adopt scale-aware analysis. [Extracted from the article]