Mining Spatial Co-Location Patterns Based on Overlap Maximal Clique Partitioning

Abstract

Spatial co-location patterns are groups of spatial features whose instances are frequently located together in spatial proximity. Most existing algorithms of discovering spatial co-location patterns are based on the candidate-test model, which is computationally expensive. When the user adjusts the participation index (PI) threshold, these algorithms have to be re-executed from the size 2 co-location patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial instance partition method for mining co-location patterns which called overlap maximal clique partitioning algorithm (OMCP). The OMCP co-location mining algorithm divides instances of an input spatial dataset into a set of overlap maximal cliques. Table instances of all colocation patterns are collected by the overlap maximal cliques. Prevalent co-location patterns are directly calculated without generating the candidate patterns. The OMCP algorithm only needs to execute once to get the PI of all patterns, without reexecuting when the PI threshold is adjusted. Our algorithm is performed on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate that the OMCP algorithm improvements in efficiency of co-location pattern mining.