A Multi-scale Method for Mining Significant Spatial Co-location Patterns
Zhanjun He, Liu Qiliang, DENG Min, Jiannan Cai · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2016
Spatial co-location patterns discovery aims to detect spatial features whose instances are frequently located in geographic proximity. Such patterns can reveal unknown regularity in geographic phenomena and they are helpful for decision-making. However, due to the little prior knowledge, it is difficult to specify thresholds for neighbor distance and prevalence index.As a result, the outcomes of most algorithms always include insignificant or even erroneous patterns. A pattern-reconstruction-based approach was proposed to discover only significant co-location patterns. Firstly, we introduce a new definition of MNND, which can identify the lower and upper bounds of neighbor distance threshold. Then, a null model was constructed based on the pattern reconstruction. On basis of that, selection of prevalence threshold is replaced by hypothesis testing. Finally, significant colocation patterns were mined at multiple distances and the results were evaluated by the notion of lifetime. The experimental results show that our approach could avoid the subjectivity in determining those thresholds, thereby improving the correctness and robustness.