Mining statistically sound co-location patterns at multiple distances

Existing co-location mining algorithms require a user provided distance threshold at which prevalent patterns are searched. Since spatial interactions, in reality, may happen at different distances, finding the right distance threshold to mine all true patterns is not easy and a single appropriate threshold may not even exist. A standard co-location mining algorithm also requires a prevalence measure threshold to find prevalent patterns. The prevalence measure values of the true co-location patterns occurring at different distances may vary and finding a prevalence measure threshold to mine all true patterns without reporting random patterns is not easy and sometimes not even possible. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to mine true co-location patterns at multiple distances. Our approach is based on a statistical test and does not require thresholds for the prevalence measure and the interaction distance. We evaluate the efficacy of our algorithm using synthetic and real data sets comparing it with the state-of-the-art co-location mining approach.