The Open Information Systems Journal

2009, 3 : 69-80
Published online 2009 August 26. DOI: 10.2174/1874133900903010069
Publisher ID: TOISJ-3-69

Efficient Discovery of Spatial Co-Location Patterns Using the iCPI-tree

Lizhen Wang , Yuzhen Bao and Zhongyu Lu
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Information, Yunnan University, Kunming, 650091, P. R. China;

ABSTRACT

With the rapid growth and extensive applications of the spatial dataset, it’s getting more important to solve how to find spatial knowledge automatically from spatial datasets. Spatial co-location patterns represent the subsets of features whose instances are frequently located together in geographic space. It’s difficult to discovery co-location patterns because of the huge amount of data brought by the instances of spatial features. A large fraction of the computation time is devoted to identifying the table instances of co-location patterns. The essence of co-location patterns discovery and four co-location patterns mining algorithms proposed in recent years are analyzed, and a new join-less approach for co-location patterns mining, which based on a data structure----iCPI-tree (Improved Co-location Pattern Instance Tree), is proposed. The iCPI-tree is an improved version of the CPI-tree which materializes spatial neighbor relationships in order to accelerate the process of identifying co-location instances. This paper proves the correctness and completeness of the new approach. Finally, an experimental evaluations using synthetic and real world datasets show that the algorithm is computationally more efficient.

Keywords:

Spatial data mining, co-location rules, table instances (or co-location instances), the iCPI-tree.