Tri-Clustering Based Exploration of Temporal Resolution Impacts on Spatio-Temporal Clusters in Geo-Referenced Time Series

Abstract

Unprecedented amounts of spatio-temporal data instigates an urgent need for patterns exploration in it. Clustering analysis is useful in extracting patterns from big data by grouping similar data elements into clusters. Compared with one-way clustering and co-clustering methods, tri-clustering methods are more capable of exploring complex patterns. However, the explored patterns or clusters could be different due to varying temporal resolutions of input data. This study presents a tri-clustering based method to explore the impacts of different temporal resolutions on spatio-temporal clusters identified in geo-referenced time series (GTS), one type of spatio-temporal data. Dutch daily temperature data at 28 stations over 20 years was used to illustrate this study. The temperature data at daily, monthly, and yearly resolutions were subjected to the Bregman cube average tri-clustering algorithm with I-divergence (BCAT_I) to detect spatio-temporal clusters, which were then compared in terms of patterns exhibited, compositions, and changed elements. Results confirm the temporal resolution impacts on the spatio-temporal clusters identified in the Dutch temperature data: most compositions of clusters are varying when changing the temporal resolutions of input data in the GTS. Nevertheless, there is almost no change of elements in certain clusters (12 stations in the northeast of the country; years 1996, 2010) at all temporal resolutions, suggesting them as the “true” clusters in the case study dataset.