Mining in Spatio-Temporal Databases

Abstract

Recent interest in spatio-temporal applications has been fueled by the need to discover and predict complex patterns that occur when we observe the behavior of objects in the three-dimensional space of time and spatial coordinates. Although the complex and intrinsic relationships among the spatio-temporal data limit the usefulness of conventional data mining techniques to discover the patterns in the spatio-temporal databases, they also lead to opportunities for mining new classes of patterns in spatio-temporal databases. This chapter provides a survey of the work done for mining patterns in spatial databases and temporal databases, and the preliminary work for mining patterns in spatio-temporal databases. We highlight the unique challenges of mining interesting patterns in spatio-temporal databases. We also describe two special types of spatio-temporal patterns: location-sensitive sequence patterns and geographical features for location-based service patterns.