Spatial Pattern Mining for Soil Erosion Characterization

The protection and the maintenance of the exceptional environment of New Caledonia are major goals for this territory. Among environmental problems, erosion has a strong impact on terrestrial and coastal ecosystems. However, due to the volume of data and its complexity, assessment of hazard at a regional scale is time-consuming, costly and rarely updated. Therefore, understanding and predicting environmental phenomenons need advanced techniques of analysis and modelization. In order to improve the understanding of the erosion phenomenon, this paper proposes a spatial approach based on co-location mining and GIS. Considering a set of Boolean spatial features, the goal of co-location mining is to find subsets of features often located together. This system provides useful and interpretable knowledge based on a new interestingness measure for co-locations and a new visualization of the discovered knowledge. The interestingness measure better reflects the importance of a co-location for the experts, and is completely integrated in the mining process. The visualization approach is a simple, concise and intuitive representation of the co-locations that takes into consideration the spatial nature of the underlying objects and the experts practice.