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.