In my opinion, It has something to do with the increasing adoption of Big Data technologies by many industries,. With increased adoption of Big Data techniques, there arise a need of better techniques to emerge leading to need of research.
In the past Big Data was used only in certain types of industries but now we have easily accessible infrastructure for collecting, storing and processing the data. The data we accumulate is getting really useful and the need of finding better value in that data lead more researchers to dive into this field.