Multi-level method for discovery of regional co-location patterns

Regional co-location patterns represent subsets of feature types that are frequently located together in sub-regions in a study area. These sub-regions are unknown a priori, and instances of these co-location patterns are usually unevenly distributed across a study area. Regional co-location patterns remain challenging to discover. This study developed a multi-level method to identify regional co-location patterns in two steps. First, global co-location patterns were detected, and other non-prevalent co-location patterns were identified as candidates for regional co-location patterns. Second, an adaptive spatial clustering method was applied to detect the sub-regions where regional co-location patterns are prevalent. To improve computational efficiency, an overlap method was developed to deduce the sub-regions of (k+1)-size co-location patterns from the sub-regions of k-size co-location patterns. Experiments based on both synthetic and ecological data sets showed that the proposed method is effective in the detection of regional co-location patterns.