A generic regional spatio-temporal co-occurrence pattern mining model: a case study for air pollution

Spatio-temporal co-occurrence patterns represent subsets of object types which are located together in both space and time. Existing algorithms for co-occurrence pattern mining cannot handle complex applications such as air pollution in several ways. First, the existing models assume that spatial relationships between objects are explicitly represented in the input data, while the new method allows extracting implicitly contained spatial relationships algorithmically. Second, instead of extracting co-occurrence patterns of only point data, the proposed method deals with different feature types that is with point, line and polygon data. Thus, it becomes relevant for a wider range of real applications. Third, it also allows mining a spatio-temporal co-occurrence pattern simultaneously in space and time so that it illustrates the evolution of patterns over space and time. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm uses a Voronoi tessellation to improve efficiency. To evaluate the proposed method, it was applied on a real case study for air pollution where the objective is to find correspondences of air pollution with other parameters which affect this phenomenon. The results of evaluation confirm not only the capability of this method for co-occurrence pattern mining of complex applications, but also it exhibits an efficient computational performance. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015