Spatial Co-Location Pattern Discovery from Fuzzy Objects

A spatial co-location pattern is a group of spatial objects whose instances are frequently located in the same region. The spatial co-location pattern mining problem has been investigated extensively in the past due to its broad range of applications. In this paper we study this problem for fuzzy objects. Fuzzy objects play an important role in many areas, such as the geographical information system and the biomedical image database. In this paper, we propose two new kinds of co-location pattern mining for fuzzy objects, single co-location pattern mining (SCP) and range co-location pattern mining (RCP), to mining co-location patterns at a membership threshold or within a membership range. For efficient SCP mining, we optimize the basic mining algorithm to accelerate the co-location pattern generation. To improve the performance of RCP mining, effective pruning strategies are developed to significantly reduce the search space. The efficiency of our proposed algorithms as well as the optimization techniques are verified with an extensive set of experiments.