Mining Maximal Dynamic Spatial Colocation Patterns

A spatial colocation pattern represents a subset of spatial features with instances that are prevalently located together in a geographic space. Although many algorithms for mining spatial colocation patterns have been proposed, the following problems still remain. these methods miss certain meaningful patterns (e.g., {Ganoderma_lucidumnew, maple_treedead} and {water_hyacinthnew(increase), algaedead(decrease)}) and obtain a wrong conclusion if the instances of two or more features increase/decrease (i.e., new/dead) in the same/approximate proportion, which has no effect on the prevalent patterns; and the efficiency of existing methods is low in mining prevalent spatial colocation patterns, because the number of prevalent spatial colocation patterns is quite large. Therefore, we first propose the concept of a dynamic spatial colocation pattern that can reflect the dynamic relationships among spatial features. Second, we mine a small number of prevalent maximal dynamic spatial colocation patterns that can derive all prevalent dynamic spatial colocation patterns, which can improve the efficiency of obtaining all prevalent dynamic spatial colocation patterns. Third, we propose an algorithm for mining prevalent maximal dynamic spatial colocation patterns and two pruning strategies. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method and the pruning strategies are verified by extensive experiments over real/synthetic data sets.