Knowledge-Based Interactive Postmining of User-Preferred Co-Location Patterns Using Ontologies.

Co-location pattern mining plays an important role in spatial data mining. With the rapid growth of spatial datasets, the usefulness of co-location patterns is strongly limited by the huge amount of discovered patterns. Although several methods have been proposed to reduce the number of discovered patterns, these statistical algorithms are unable to guarantee that the extracted co-location patterns are user preferred. Therefore, it is crucial to help the decision maker discover his/her preferred co-location patterns via efficient interactive procedures. This article proposes a new interactive approach that enables the user to discover his/her preferred co-location patterns. First, we present a novel and flexible interactive framework to assist the user in discovering his/her preferred co-location patterns. Second, we propose using ontologies to measure the similarity of two co-location patterns. Furthermore, we design a pruning scheme by introducing a pattern filtering model for expressing the user's preference, to reduce the number of the final output. By applying our proposed approach over voluminous sets of co-location patterns, we show that the number of filtered co-location patterns is reduced to several dozen or less and, on average, 80% of the selected co-location patterns are user preferred.

Mining Non-Redundant Co-Location Patterns.

Co-location pattern mining refers to discovering neighboring relationships of spatial features distributed in geographic space. With the rapid growth of spatial datasets, the usefulness of co-location patterns is strongly limited by the large number of discovered patterns containing multiple redundancies. To address this problem, in this article, we propose a novel approach for discovering the super participation index-closed (SPI-closed) co-location patterns which are a newly proposed lossless condensed representation of co-location patterns by considering distributions of the spatial instances. In the proposed approach, first, a linear-time method is designed to generate complete and correct neighboring cliques using extended neighboring relationships. Based on these cliques, a hash structure is then constructed to store the distributions of the co-location patterns in a condensed way. Finally, using this hash structure, the SPI-closed co-location patterns (SCPs) are efficiently discovered even if the prevalence threshold is changed, while similar approaches have to restart their mining processes. To confirm the efficiency of the proposed method, we compared its performance with similar approaches in the literature on multiple real and synthetic spatial datasets. The experiments confirm that our new approach is more efficient, effective, and flexible than similar approaches.