Towards safe navigation environment: The imminent role of spatio-temporal pattern mining in maritime piracy incidents analysis

Since the new century, we have witnessed the fast evolution of pirate attack modes in terms of locations, time, used weapons, and targeted ships. It reveals that the current understanding of pirate attack spatio-temporal patterns is fading, requiring new technologies of big data analysis to master the hidden rules of piracy-related risk spatio-temporal patterns and rationalize the development of relevant anti-piracy measures and policies. This paper aims to develop a new framework of spatio-temporal pattern mining to realize the visualization and analysis of maritime piracy incidents from different standpoints using a new piracy incident database generated from three datasets. Time-based, space-based, and spatial-temporal pattern mining of piracy incidents are systematically investigated to dissect the influence of different risk factors and mine the characteristics of the incidents. Moreover, a novel Fast Adaptive Dynamic Time Warping (FADTW) method is proposed to uncover the hidden temporal and spatial-temporal patterns of piracy incidents. Furthermore, Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) is applied to extract the spatial distribution patterns and discover the high-risk areas. Finally, risk factors-based classification exploration has uncovered different spatial patterns. The findings, showing the global and local features of piracy incidents, have made significant contributions to rationalizing anti-pirate measures for safe navigation.