Spatial co-location pattern mining over extended objects based on cell-relation operations.

• A new cell-based method for mining co-locations on extended objects was presented. • Cell-relation operations replaced instance computing to speed up the calculation. • Neighbor relations were materialized into feature transactions of cells. • The algorithm was compared with the latest algorithm and the classical one. Spatial co-location pattern mining (SCPM) is intended to discover subsets of spatial features whose instances are frequently located together in geographic areas. Traditional SCPM methods are designed for point spatial instances. However, in reality, instances are mostly in the form of extended objects, e.g., lines, polygons. In addition, current SCPM methods with extended objects are less well researched and have two disadvantages: (1) Existing researches cannot effectively capture neighborhood relationships between extended objects and their mining results cannot properly reflect the distribution dependence of features; (2) These methods are not efficient enough with large datasets. This paper proposes a novel framework called cell-relation operations framework to overcome these issues. To eliminate the first shortcoming, the framework uses the area overlapping of buffers between objects to gain the neighbor relationships between extended objects and introduces participation index under buffer size k to identify prevalent co-location patterns. To address the second problem, our framework employs cell-relation operations rather than instance relation computing as the basic computing unit for co-location mining, which substantially speeds up the computation. The framework obtains spatial co-locations by counting the feature transactions of the cells and calculates the feature overlap ratio of the cells to generate co-locations. We implement experiments with real datasets to demonstrate that our framework's mining results are more reasonable and the proposed framework's runtime outperforms the baselines by 2 to 4 orders of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]