Spatial Co-location Patterns Research Articles

A Novel Algorithm for Efficiently Mining Spatial Multi-Level Co-Location Patterns

A Novel Algorithm for Efficiently Mining Spatial Multi-Level Co-Location Patterns

Graph-based spatial co-location pattern mining: integrate geospatial analysis and logical reasoning

ABSTRACT Spatial co-location patterns reflect the inherent correlations among geographical elements. Mining co-location patterns of POIs can provide valuable insights for urban planning and resource management. Generally, co-location mining comprises two steps: proximity relationship determination (geospatial analysis) and frequent pattern recursion (logical reasoning). Previous methods often separate these two steps: serializing proximity relationships to enumerate frequent sequences. However, this approach suffers from limited flexibility and intuitiveness: as continuous spatial contexts are segmented into numerous small parts, it fails to adequately represent geographic correlations and hinders the effective visualization of logical reasoning. Facing these challenges, this study proposes a novel graph-based spatial co-location mining method (GSCM), which leverages graphs to integrate geospatial analysis and logical reasoning. Initially, to establish adjacency relationships, GSCM constructs the adaptive neighborhood graph, which dynamically adjusts proximity thresholds to accommodate geographic heterogeneity. Subsequently, the Apriori logical recursive process is realized on the graph structure. By leveraging graph searching, pruning, and growing, the potential growth directions of co-location patterns are identified, enhancing both the efficiency and intuition of frequent pattern recursion. Through experiments conducted on large-scale POI datasets from Wuhan, GSCM is compared with existing baseline methods, verifying its potential to uncover co-location patterns in complex spatial contexts.

Representative co-location pattern post-mining based on maximal row instances representation model

The mining result set of spatial prevalent co-location patterns(SPCPs) is often large and redundant, especially when the prevalence threshold is set to low or long SPCPs are present. Meanwhile, the distribution of SPCPs in continuous space and complex spatial relationships with each other of spatial data make the compression and reorganization of SPCPs a challenging problem. To solve this problem, in this paper, a representative co-location pattern mining framework based on the maximal row instance(MRI) representation model is proposed. First, the MRI representation model is proposed to effectively preserve the pattern distribution information of prevalent co-location patterns. To establish the MRI representation model, the basic algorithm and geometric algorithm are proposed in this paper. Two materialization methods based on the MRI representation model, 0-1 vector and key–value vector, are presented. Secondly, the similarity measure of SPCPs under the context of the MRI representation model is proposed, which calculates the similarity between any two co-location patterns without adding additional information such as domain background. Furthermore, the mining framework based on the k nearest neighbors density peak clustering algorithm is presented to extract representative co-location patterns. Finally, the efficiency and scalability of the proposed method are verified on the synthetic data and real data. Compared with the existing methods, the representative co-location patterns of the proposed method have well compression performances.

Mining Spatial Co-Location Patterns With a Mixed Prevalence Measure.

A co-location pattern indicates a subset of spatial features whose instances are frequently located together in proximate geographical space. Most previous studies of spatial co-location pattern mining concern what percentage of instances per feature are involved in the table instance of a pattern, but neglect the heterogeneity in the number of feature instances and the distribution of instances. As a result, the deviation may be occurred in the interest measure of co-locations. In this article, we propose a novel mixed prevalence index (MPI) incorporating the effect of feature-level and instance-level heterogeneity on the prevalence measure, which can address some dilemmas in existing interest measures. Luckily, MPI possesses the partial antimonotone property. In virtue of this property, a branch-based search algorithm equipped with some optimizing strategies of MPI calculation is proposed, namely, Branch-Opt-MPI. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on both real and synthetic spatial datasets. Experimental results reveal the superiority of MPI compared to other interest measures and also validate the efficiency and scalability of the Branch-Opt-MPI. Particularly, the Branch-Opt-MPI performs more efficiently than baselines for several times or even orders of magnitude in dense data.

Identifying a good business location using prescriptive analytics: Restaurant location recommendation based on spatial data mining

This study proposes a new prescriptive analytics method that aims to provide decision-makers with a systematic and objective approach to identify suitable locations, considering the spatial distribution of different types of restaurants. The method comprises of two main components: spatial co-location pattern mining and locationGCN, where locationGCN is based on graph convolutional network (GCN). The spatial co-location pattern mining is utilized to capture the spatial correlation of specific restaurant to determine the candidate location selection range. The locationGCN is designed to further screen out final suitable location ranges for the specific restaurant type. A case study using restaurant data from Xiamen Island collected from Dianping.com is conducted. The empirical results demonstrate that the algorithm achieves an accuracy of 74.88%, precision of 63.59%, and recall of 77.48%. Results indicate that the proposed approach can provide suitable location recommendations for specific types of restaurants based on existing restaurant distribution information.

A fast spatial high utility co-location pattern mining approach based on branch-and-depth-extension

Mining co-location patterns hidden in spatial data is crucial for spatial association discovery, and it has broad prospects in many applications. High Utility Co-location Pattern Mining (HUCPM) further takes the utility factor of spatial features into consideration, so it is more realistic compared with the traditional co-location pattern mining. However, HUCPM is more difficult, since the Apriori-like pruning technique does not apply. To address this problem, we firstly suggest two novel pruning strategies to trim the pattern search space. Then, a series of optimizing techniques are presented to speed up the pattern utility ratio calculation of each candidate. Based on above techniques, a fast HUCPM algorithm is proposed, which searches for high utility co-locations involved in each pattern branch via a depth-extending manner and equips with a heuristic strategy to enhance the effect of pruning techniques. Moreover, we theoretically prove the completeness and correctness of the proposed algorithm, and discuss its algorithmic complexity. On multiple spatial datasets, we conduct substantial experiments to reveal the superiority of our algorithm in efficiency and scalability, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Particularly, the proposed algorithm in this paper runs faster than other baselines for several times to several orders of magnitude.

Fuzzy Regional Co-Location Pattern Mining Based on Efficient Density Peak Clustering and Maximal Fuzzy Grid Cliques

Due to the heterogeneity of data distribution in real life and the spatial autocorrelation among spatial instances, traditional spatial co-location pattern mining methods tend to ignore valuable information specific to local regions. To address the limitation, regional co-location pattern mining has been proposed to find patterns that may be hidden within local regions. In this paper, a fuzzy regional co-location pattern mining framework based on efficient density peak clustering and maximal fuzzy grid cliques is presented. By incorporating a grid-splitting method and fuzzy theory, an efficient density peak clustering algorithm is proposed to divide the global area into distinct local regions. Furthermore, we propose a method to materialize the neighbor relationships between instances based on the maximal fuzzy grid cliques, and parallelize the clustering process to improve the algorithm efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can not only reduce the time consumption by about 40%, but also mine meaningful patterns with tighter instance distributions.

Spatial co-location patterns between early COVID-19 risk and urban facilities: a case study of Wuhan, China.

COVID-19, being a new type of infectious disease, holds significant implications for scientific prevention and control to understand its spatiotemporal transmission process. This study examines the diverse spatial patterns of COVID-19 within Wuhan by analyzing early case data alongside urban infrastructure information. Through co-location analysis, we assess both local and global spatial risks linked to the epidemic. In addition, we use the Geodetector, identifying facilities displaying unique spatial risk characteristics, revealing factors contributing to heightened risk. Our findings unveil a noticeable spatial distribution of COVID-19 in the city, notably influenced by road networks and functional zones. Higher risk levels are observed in the central city compared to its outskirts. Specific facilities such as parking, residence, ATM, bank, entertainment, and hospital consistently exhibit connections with COVID-19 case sites. Conversely, facilities like subway station, dessert restaurant, and movie theater display a stronger association with case sites as distance increases, hinting at their potential as outbreak focal points. Despite our success in containing the recent COVID-19 outbreak, uncertainties persist regarding its origin and initial spread. Some experts caution that with increased human activity, similar outbreaks might become more frequent. This research provides a comprehensive analytical framework centered on urban facilities, contributing quantitatively to understanding their impact on the spatial risks linked with COVID-19 outbreaks. It enriches our understanding of the interconnectedness between urban facility distribution and transportation flow, affirming and refining the distance decay law governing infectious disease risks. Furthermore, the study offers practical guidance for post-epidemic urban planning, promoting the development of safer urban environments resilient to epidemics. It equips government bodies with a reliable quantitative analysis method for more accurately predicting and assessing infectious disease risks. In conclusion, this study furnishes both theoretical and empirical support for tailoring distinct strategies to prevent and control COVID-19 epidemics.

Mining co-location patterns of manufacturing firms using Q statistic and additive color mixing.

The agglomeration effect significantly influences firms' site selection. Manufacturing firms often exhibit intricate spatial co-location patterns that are indicative of agglomerations due to their reliance on material input and product output across various subdivisions of manufacture. In this study, we present an analytical approach employing the Q statistic and additive color mixing visualization to assess co-location patterns of manufacturing firms. We identified frequent pairs and triplets of manufacturing divisions, mapping them to reveal distinct categories: labor-intensive clusters, upstream/downstream industrial chains, and technology-spillover clusters. These agglomeration categories concentrate in different regions of the city. Policy implications are proposed to promote the upgrade of labor-intensive divisions, enhance the operational efficiency of upstream/downstream industrial chains, and reinforce the spillover effects of technology-intensive divisions.

RCPM_CFI: A regional core pattern mining method based on core feature influence

Regional co-location pattern mining is a branch of spatial co-location pattern mining, which is used to discover co-location patterns that prevalently co-occur in local regions. The regional co-location patterns can reveal the association relationships among spatial features in the local regions. However, in practice, the association relationship between certain features is asymmetrical, and some features play a key (core) role in the relationship, as central position. To explore the regional co-location patterns with core feature (called regional core patterns (RCPs)) as well as their prevalent regions, this paper presents a regional partition method based on the influence of core feature. Additionally, a regional core pattern mining (RCPM) algorithm is proposed to mine the RCPs and unveil their spatial distribution resulting from the arrangement of core feature. In the regional partition stage, we propose a partition criterion that takes into account the influence of core feature. This criterion aims to comprehensively address the spatial distribution relationship between core instances and their neighboring non-core instances, ensuring the partition process is rational and complete. In the RCPM stage, we propose a core-based nearest affiliation measure method to assess the neighbor relationship between core and non-core instances, which can consider the fact that there is competition between spatial instances of the same spatial feature. And, to effectively calculate pattern prevalence and quickly identify RCPs, we present a data structure called Core_Hash to store the influence relationship between core and non-core instances. Extensive experimental evaluations and analyses are conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets. Compared to the existing algorithms, our proposed algorithms yield more reasonable and comprehensive RCPs and demonstrate good efficiency and scalability.

Mining Highly Visited Co-Location Patterns Based on Minimum Visitor Similarity Constraints

Spatial co-location pattern is a subset of spatial features which shows association relationships based on the spatial neighborhoods. Because the previous prevalence measurements of a co-location pattern have not considered the visited information of spatial instances, co-location patterns do not reflect the social connections (such as their spatial instances are constantly visited by common or similar moving objects) between spatial features. In this paper, a special type of co-location pattern, “Highly visited co-location patterns”, is proposed, which considers the spatial proximity and visitor similarity of spatial features at the same time. A new measurement, “Minimum visitor similarity”, has been proposed to reflect the visitor similarity of co-location patterns. By discussing the properties of the minimum visitor similarity, we propose an efficient algorithm to mine the highly visited co-locations and give two pruning strategies to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. Finally, extensive experiments on YELP and Foursquare datasets prove the practicability and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, and we define a “Social Entropy” to prove that spatial features in the co-locations we mined have stronger social connections.

Multi-Type Features Embedded Deep Learning Framework for Residential Building Prediction

Building type prediction is a critical task for urban planning and population estimation. The growing availability of multi-source data presents rich semantic information for building type prediction. However, existing residential building prediction methods have problems with feature extraction and fusion from multi-type data and multi-level interactions between features. To overcome these limitations, we propose a deep learning approach that takes both the internal and external characteristics of buildings into consideration for residential building prediction. The internal features are the shape characteristics of buildings, and the external features include location features and semantic features. The location features include the proximity of the buildings to the nearest road and areas of interest (AOI), and the semantic features are mainly threefold: spatial co-location patterns of points of interest (POI), nighttime light, and land use information of the buildings. A deep learning model, DeepFM, with multi-type features embedded, was deployed to train and predict building types. Comparative and ablation experiments using OpenStreetMap and the nighttime light dataset were carried out. The results showed that our model had significantly higher classification performance compared with other models, and the F1 score of our model was 0.9444. It testified that the external semantic features of the building significantly enhanced the predicted performance. Moreover, our model showed good performance in the transfer learning between different regions. This research not only significantly enhances the accuracy of residential building identification but also offers valuable insights and ideas for related studies.

SCPM-CR: A Novel Method for Spatial Co-Location Pattern Mining With Coupling Relation Consideration

Spatial co-location pattern mining (SCPM) aims to discover subsets of spatial features frequently located together in proximate areas. Previous studies of SCPM solely concern the inter-features association of a pattern, but neglect the interesting intra-feature behavior. In this paper, we propose the task of spatial co-location pattern mining with coupling relation consideration (SCPM-CR) to capture complex relations embedded in a co-location. Specifically, InterPCI measure is designed to capture the inter-features coupling by considering the comprehensive interaction of objects for the features in a pattern, and luckily it possesses the anti-monotone property. Another measure, IntraCAI, is proposed to capture the congregating behavior of intra-feature objects under the restriction of a co-location. A general framework is designed for SCPM-CR task and experiments show that a large fraction of computation time is devoted to identifying the participating objects of a candidate pattern. To tackle this calculation bottleneck, a novel candidate-and-search algorithm is suggested, CS-HBS, equipped with heuristic backtracking search. Extensive experiments are conducted on real and synthetic datasets to demonstrate the superiority of SCPM-CR compared with traditional SCPM methods, and also to validate the efficiency and scalability of CS-HBS. Experimental results show that CS-HBS outperforms the baselines by several times or even orders of magnitude.

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

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.

Mining spatial high-average utility co-location patterns from spatial data sets

The spatial co-location pattern refers to a subset of non-empty spatial features whose instances are frequently located together in a spatial neighborhood. Traditional spatial co-location pattern mining is mainly based on the frequency of the pattern, and there is no difference in the importance or value of each spatial feature within the pattern. Although the spatial high utility co-location pattern mining solves this problem, it does not consider the effect of pattern length on the utility. Generally, the utility of the pattern also increases as the length of the pattern increases. Therefore, the evaluation criterion of the high utility co-location mining is unfair to the short patterns. In order to solve this problem, this paper first considers the utility and length of the co-location pattern comprehensively, and proposes a more reasonable High-Average Utility Co-location Pattern (HAUCP). Then, we propose a basic algorithm based on the extended average utility ratio of co-location patterns to mining all HAUCPs, which solves the problem that the average utility ratio of patterns does not satisfy the downward closure property. Next, an improved algorithm based on the local extended average utility ratio is developed which effectively reduces the search space of the basic algorithm and improves the mining efficiency. Finally, the practicability and robustness of the proposed method are verified based on real and synthetic data sets. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively and efficiently find the HAUCPs from spatial data sets.

A Spatial Fuzzy Co-Location Pattern Mining Method Based on Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets

The goal of spatial co-location pattern mining is to find subsets of spatial features whose instances are often neighbors in a geographical space. In many practical cases, instances of spatial features contain not only spatial location information but also attribute information. Although there have been several studies that use type-1 fuzzy membership functions to mine spatial fuzzy co-location patterns, there is great uncertainty associated with such membership functions. To address this problem, we propose a spatial fuzzy co-location pattern mining method based on interval type-2 fuzzy sets. First, we collect the interval evaluation values of the interval data of attribute information from experts to form granular data. Next, the original type-1 fuzzy membership function is extended to a granular type-2 fuzzy membership function based on elliptic curves. We use a gradual method to adjust the parameters of the fuzzy membership function so that its footprint of uncertainty satisfies both the connectivity and the given confidence. Based on this granular type-2 fuzzy membership function, we fuzzify the attribute information of instances and define the concepts of fuzzy features and fuzzy co-location patterns. A fuzzy co-location pattern mining algorithm based on spatial cliques is then proposed, termed the FCPM-Clique algorithm. In order to improve the efficiency of the algorithm, we propose two pruning strategies. In addition, we extend two classical spatial pattern mining algorithms, the Join-based algorithm and the Joinless algorithm, to mine fuzzy co-location patterns based on interval type-2 fuzzy sets. Many experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets are conducted, the performance of the three algorithms is compared, and the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed FCPM-Clique algorithm is demonstrated.

Urban Vehicle Localization in Public LoRaWan Network

Location-based services (LBS) such as LoRa geolocation are important aspects of IoT applications. In this article, we propose a hierarchical clustering-based technique for urban vehicle localization using received signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements in a public LoRaWan network. The solution relies on a two-layer hierarchy: the first layer consists of a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -Means clustering to partition a large urban area into several regions based on geographical coordinates of the datapoints. A coarse localizer utilizes kernel density estimation to model the received signal distribution of each gateway and determine in which the most probable regions of interests the vehicle is located, followed by a finer localization step at the second layer. For each region, reference points are grouped based on the similarity between the gateway coverage vectors. A spatial kernel-based fingerprint method that adopts spatial co-location patterns between neighbors is introduced to provide support for further fine granularity positioning within each region. The Kullback–Leibler divergence is used to measure similarities between observations and fingerprints, and the final position estimation is based on a weighted kernel regression model. The system is evaluated using a publicly available LoRaWan data set collected in large urban areas in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. We are able to achieve a median error of 158.41 m and a mean error of 346.03 m based on the raw LoRa RSSI data, and it is reported as the best accuracy based on the same data set in the literature.

A spatial co-location pattern mining approach based on column calculation

Spatial co-location pattern mining aims to discover correlations between spatial features. A co-location pattern corresponds to a subset of spatial features whose instances are frequently located in spatial neighborhoods. Most co-location pattern mining approaches calculate the prevalence based on table instances, but the time and space costs of generating table instances are enormous. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel co-location pattern mining approach based on column calculation, which only searches for participating instances of features in a pattern without having to generate the table instance. Furthermore, this paper designs the instance search space pruning, the candidate participating instance verification, and the prevalence beforehand awareness technologies to speed up the search of participating instances. The CPM-Col method is proposed on this basis, and its complexity, accuracy, and completeness are addressed. Extensive experiments are conducted on real and synthetic datasets, and experimental results show that the CPM-Col algorithm has better performance and scalability than seven other baseline algorithms, especially with a performance gain of several times or even orders of magnitude. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed optimization strategies is verified experimentally.

Spatial Negative Co-Location Pattern Directional Mining Algorithm with Join-Based Prevalence

It is usually difficult for prevalent negative co-location patterns to be mined and calculated. This paper proposes a join-based prevalent negative co-location mining algorithm, which can quickly and effectively mine all the prevalent negative co-location patterns in spatial data. Firstly, this paper verifies the monotonic nondecreasing property of the negative co-location participation index (PI) value as the size increases. Secondly, using this property, it is deduced that any prevalent negative co-location pattern with size n can be generated by connecting prevalent co-location with size 2 and with an n − 1 size candidate negative co-location pattern or an n − 1 size prevalent positive co-location pattern. Finally, the experiment results demonstrate that while other conditions are fixed, the proposed algorithm has an excellent efficiency level. The algorithm can eliminate the 90% useless negative co-location pattern maximumly and eliminate the useless 40% negative co-location pattern averagely.

Efficiently mining spatial co-location patterns utilizing fuzzy grid cliques

Spatial co-location pattern (SCP) mining discovers subsets of spatial feature types whose objects frequently co-locate in a geographic space. Many existing methods treat the space as homogeneous, use absolute Euclidean distance to measure the neighbor relationship between objects and use a participation index to measure the prevalence of SCPs. Several issues arise: (1) it may be that the distance between objects cannot be accurately defined since it is a relative and fuzzy concept; (2) the degree of neighborliness and sharing relationships between objects are neglected; (3) current methods for collecting participating objects by generating candidate table instances utilizing combined search techniques are computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a method based on fuzzy grid cliques to find all prevalent SCPs. Specifically, fuzzy theory is introduced to define the proximity between objects. The fuzzy participating contribution index (FPCI) is defined to measure the prevalence of SCPs, and it considers both the neighbor degree and sharing relationship between objects. Based on the defined proximity, a basic mining framework based on fuzzy grid cliques is proposed. We first design a naive algorithm based on the participating objects’ filtering and verification called POFV, which uses a fuzzy grid clique search technology instead of combination search to collect participating objects and avoids enumerating all table instances. To solve a dilemma within POFV, we develop a maximal fuzzy grid cliques search based algorithm called MFGC, which can effectively reuse information. Experiments on both real and synthetic data sets verify the superiority of our proposed approaches, by showing that MFGC greatly outperforms the baseline algorithm and more efficiently captures SCPs.