Explosive growth in geospatial data and the emergence of new spatial technologies emphasize the need for automated discovery of spatial knowledge. Spatial data mining is the process of discovering interesting and previously unknown, but potentially useful patterns from large spatial databases. The complexity of spatial data and implicit spatial relationships limits the usefulness of conventional data mining techniques for extracting spatial patterns. In this paper, we explore the emerging field of spatial data mining, focusing on different methods to extract patterns from spatial information. We conclude with a look at future research needs.

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Zonal co-location patterns represent subsets of featuretypes that are frequently located in a subset of space (i.e., zone). Discovering zonal spatial co-location patterns is an important problem with many applications in areas such as ecology, public health, and homeland defense. However, discovering these patterns with dynamic parameters (i.e., repeated specification of zone and interest measure values according to user preferences) is computationally complex due to the repetitive mining process. Also, the set of candidate patterns is exponential in the number of feature types, and spatial datasets are huge. Previous studies have focused on discovering global spatial co-location patterns with a fixed interest measure threshold. In this paper, we propose an indexing structure for co-location patterns and propose algorithms (Zoloc-Miner) to discover zonal colocation patterns efficiently for dynamic parameters. Extensive experimental evaluation shows our proposed approaches are scalable, efficient, and outperform naïve alternatives.

Developing a model that facilitates the representation and knowledge discovery on sensor data presents many challenges. With sensors reporting data at a very high frequency, resulting in large volumes of data, there is a need for a model that is memory efficient. Since sensor data is spatio-temporal in nature, the model must also support the time dependence of the data. Balancing the conflicting requirements of simplicity, expressiveness and storage efficiency is challenging. The model should also provide adequate support for the formulation of efficient algorithms for knowledge discovery. Though spatio-temporal data can be modeled using time expanded graphs, this model replicates the entire graph across time instants, resulting in high storage overhead and computationally expensive algorithms. In this paper, we propose Spatio-Temporal Sensor Graphs (STSG) to model sensor data at the conceptual. logical and physical levels. This model allows the properties of edges and nodes to be modeled as a time series of measurement data. Data at each instant would consist of the measured value and the expected error. Also, we evaluate the model using methods to find interesting patterns such as growing hotspots in sensor data and present analytical comparison of the algorithms with methods based on existing models.