Simona Balzano is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy, where she teaches on data analysis and research methods in management. Her recent research activities concern multivariate analysis, partial least squares regression and path-modeling, and structural equation modeling. Her interests include applications in performance analysis, consumer analysis, and other related fields of business and industry.

Giovanni C. Porzio is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy, where he has previously served as Department Head and Director of Graduate Studies in Economics. His research interests include directional statistics, statistical learning, nonparametric multivariate analysis and data depth, graphical methods and data visualization. His research work has appeared in several journals and books.

Renato Salvatore is an Assistant Professor of Economic Statistics at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy. He has co-authored papers, book chapters, and proceedings on sampling surveys, small area estimation, and multivariate analysis. In addition, he has been co-editor of several conference proceedings, and currently teaches on economic statistics and market analysis.

Domenico Vistocco is an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. He is an Associate Editor of Computational Statistics and Editorial Manager of Statistica Applicata - Italian Journal of Applied Statistics. He has co-authored two books on quantile regression and ca. 100 papers, book chapters, proceedings, post-proceedings and editorials on various statistical topics. He teaches on statistical inference, data analysis, applied statistics and statistical programming. His research interests include quantile regression, computational statistics, statistical models, exploratory data analysis and visualization.

Maurizio Vichi is a Professor of Statistics and Chair of the Department of Statistical Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. He is also Coordinating Editor of the international journal Advances in Data Analysis and Classification and Acting Chair of the European Statistical Advisory Committee of the EU. He teaches on multivariate statistics and data analysis and statistical modeling. His research interests include statistical models for clustering, classification, dimensionality reduction, composite indicators, PLS, SEM and new methods for official statistics based on smart statistics and big data analysis. He is the author of more than 150 papers, mainly published in peer-reviewed international statistics journals.