A filter-and-refine approach to mine spatiotemporal co-occurrences

Abstract

Spatiotemporal co-occurrence patterns (STCOPs) represent the subsets of event types that occur together in both space and time. However, the discovery of STCOPs in data sets with extended spatial representations that evolve over time is computationally expensive because of the necessity to calculate interest measures to assess the co-occurrence strength, and the number of candidates for STCOPs growing exponentially with the number of spatiotemporal event types. In this paper, we introduce a novel and effective filter-and-refine algorithm to efficiently find prevalent STCOPs in massive spatiotemporal data repositories with polygon shapes that move and evolve over time. We provide theoretical analysis of our approach, and follow this investigation with a practical evaluation of our algorithm effectiveness on three real-life data sets and one artificial data set. © 2013 ACM.