Efficient Retrieval of Top-k Weighted Spatial Triangles

Abstract

Due to the proliferation of location-based services and IoT devices, a lot of spatial points are being generated. Spatial data analysis is well known to be an important task. As spatial data analysis tools, graphs consisting of spatial points, where each point has edges to its nearby points and the weight of each edge is the distance between the corresponding points, have been receiving much attention. We focus on triangles (one of the simplest sub-graph patterns) in such graphs and address the problem of retrieving the top-k weighted spatial triangles. This problem has important real-life applications, e.g., group search, urban planning, and co-location pattern mining. However, this problem is computationally challenging, because the number of triangles in a graph is generally huge and enumerating all of them is not feasible. To solve this challenge, we propose an efficient algorithm that returns the exact result. Our experimental results on real datasets show the efficiency of our algorithm.KeywordsSpatial pointsWeighted graphTop-k retrieval