UNIT-5

MINING COMPLEX TYPES OF DATA AND

DATA MINING APPLICATIONS
MINING SPATIAL DATABASES

A spatial database stores a large amount of space-related data, such as maps, preprocessed

remote sensing or medical imaging data, and VLSI chip layout data.

Spatial databases have many features distinguishing them from relational databases.

They carry topological and/or distance information, usually organized by sophisticated,

multidimensional spatial indexing structures that are accessed by spatial data access methods

and often require spatial reasoning, geometric computation, and spatial knowledge

representation techniques.
Spatial data mining refers to the extraction of knowledge, spatial relationships, or other

interesting patterns not explicitly stored in spatial databases. Such mining demands an

integration of data mining with spatial database technologies.

It is expected to have wide applications in geographic information systems, geomarketing,

remote sensing, image database exploration, medical imaging, navigation, traffic control,

environmental studies, and many other areas where spatial data are used.

A crucial challenge to spatial data mining is the exploration of efficient spatial data mining

techniques due to the huge amount of spatial data and the complexity of spatial data types and

spatial access methods.

Spatial Data Cube Construction and Spatial OLAP

“Can we construct a spatial data warehouse?” Yes, as with relational data, we can integrate

spatial data to construct a data warehouse that facilitates spatial data mining.

A spatial data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and nonvolatile

collection of both spatial and nonspatial data in support of spatial data mining and spatial-data

related decision-making processes.

Let’s look at the following example.

There are about 3,000 weather probes distributed in British Columbia (BC), Canada, each

recording daily temperature and precipitation for a designated small area and transmitting

signals to a provincial weather station.

With a spatial data warehouse that supports spatial OLAP, a user can view weather patterns on a

map by month, by region, and by different combinations of temperature and precipitation, and

can dynamically drill down or roll up along any dimension to explore desired patterns, such as

“wet and hot regions in the Fraser Valley in Summer 1999.”

There are several challenging issues regarding the construction and utilization of spatial data

warehouses.

The first challenge is the integration of spatial data from heterogeneous sources and systems.

The second challenge is the realization of fast and flexible on-line analytical processing in spatial

data warehouses. The star schema is a good choice for modeling spatial data warehouses because

it provides a concise and organized warehouse structure and facilitates OLAP operations.
There are three types of dimensions in a spatial data cube:

A nonspatial dimension contains only nonspatial data. Nonspatial dimensions temperature and

precipitation can be constructed for the warehouse in Example, since each contains nonspatial data

whose generalizations are nonspatial (such as “hot” for temperature and “wet” for precipitation).

A spatial-to-nonspatial dimension is a dimension whose primitive-level data are spatial but

whose generalization, starting at a certain high level, becomes nonspatial.

For example, the spatial dimension city relays geographic data for the U.S. map. Suppose that the

dimension’s spatial representation of, say, Seattle is generalized to the string “pacific northwest.”

Although “pacific northwest” is a spatial concept, its representation is not spatial (since, in our

example, it is a string). It therefore plays the role of a nonspatial dimension.

A spatial-to-spatial dimension is a dimension whose primitive level and all of its high level

generalized data are spatial.

For example, the dimension equi temperature region contains spatial data, as do all of its

generalizations, such as with regions covering 0-5 degrees (Celsius), 5-10 degrees, and so on.
There are two types of measures in a spatial data cube:

 A numerical measure contains only numerical data. For example, one measure in a spatial

data warehouse could be the monthly revenue of a region, so that a roll-up may compute the

total revenue by year, by county, and so on. Numerical measures can be further classified into

distributive, algebraic, and holistic.

 A spatial measure contains a collection of pointers to spatial objects. For example, in a

generalization (or roll-up) in the spatial data cube of Example, the regions with the same

range of temperature and precipitation will be grouped into the same cell, and the measure so

formed contains a collection of pointers to those regions.

There are at least three possible choices in regard to the computation of spatial measures in

spatial data cube construction:

 Collect and store the corresponding spatial object pointers but do not perform precomputation

of spatial measures in the spatial data cube.

 Precompute and store a rough approximation of the spatial measures in the spatial data cube.

 Selectively precompute some spatial measures in the spatial data cube.

Mining Spatial Association and Co-location Patterns

Similar to the mining of association rules in transactional and relational databases, spatial

association rules can be mined in spatial databases. A spatial association rule is of the form A ⇒ B

[s%,c%], where A and B are sets of spatial or nonspatial predicates, s% is the support of the rule,

and c% is the confidence of the rule. For example, the following is a spatial association rule:

This rule states that 80% of schools that are close to sports centers are also close to parks, and

0.5% of the data belongs to such a case.

Besides mining spatial association rules, one may like to identify groups of particular features that

appear frequently close to each other in a geospatial map.

Such a problem is essentially the problem of mining spatial co-locations. Finding spatial

co-locations can be considered as a special case of mining spatial associations.

Spatial Clustering Methods

Spatial data clustering identifies clusters, or densely populated regions, according to some

distance measurement in a large, multidimensional data set.

Spatial Classification and Spatial Trend Analysis

Spatial classification analyzes spatial objects to derive classification schemes in relevance to

certain spatial properties, such as the neighborhood of a district, highway, or river.

Spatial classification:

Suppose that you would like to classify regions in a province into rich versus poor according to

the average family income.

In doing so, you would like to identify the important spatial-related factors that determine a

region’s classification.

Many properties are associated with spatial objects, such as hosting a university, containing

interstate highways, being near a lake or ocean, and so on.

These properties can be used for relevance analysis and to find interesting classification schemes.
Spatial trend analysis deals with another issue: the detection of changes and trends along a spatial

dimension.

Typically, trend analysis detects changes with time, such as the changes of temporal patterns in

time-series data.

Spatial trend analysis replaces time with space and studies the trend of nonspatial or spatial data

changing with space.

Mining Raster Databases

Spatial database systems usually handle vector data that consist of points, lines, polygons

(regions), and their compositions, such as networks or partitions.

Typical examples of such data include maps, design graphs, and 3-D representations of the

arrangement of the chains of protein molecules.

However, a huge amount of space-related data are in digital raster (image) forms, such as satellite

images, remote sensing data, and computer tomography.