Thanks to the fast development of new technologies,it is now possible to obtain large-scale biological and medical data in a high-throughput fashion.The vast amount of data not only opens a door of new concepts such as personalized therapy and early diagnosis of diseases (e.g.cancer),but also raises many challenging questions,such as how to extract useful information from data robustly and efficiently in a quantitative manner and how to figure out the functioning principles of biological systems based on the measurements of possibly interacting sub-systems.