A parallel spatial co-location pattern mining approach based on ordered clique growth

Abstract

Co-location patterns or subsets of spatial features, whose instances are frequently located together, are particularly valuable for discovering spatial dependencies. Although lots of spatial co-location pattern mining approaches have been proposed, the computational cost is still expensive. In this paper, we propose an iterative mining framework based on MapReduce to mine co-location patterns efficiently from massive spatial data. Our approach searches for co-location patterns in parallel through expanding ordered cliques and there is no candidate set generated. A large number of experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed method is efficient and scalable for massive spatial data, and is faster than other parallel methods.