Mining Spatial Co-Location Patterns Based on Overlap Maximal Clique Partitioning

Spatial co-location patterns are groups of spatial features whose instances are frequently located together in spatial proximity. Most existing algorithms of discovering spatial co-location patterns are based on the candidate-test model, which is computationally expensive. When the user adjusts the participation index (PI) threshold, these algorithms have to be re-executed from the size 2 co-location patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial instance partition method for mining co-location patterns which called overlap maximal clique partitioning algorithm (OMCP). The OMCP co-location mining algorithm divides instances of an input spatial dataset into a set of overlap maximal cliques. Table instances of all colocation patterns are collected by the overlap maximal cliques. Prevalent co-location patterns are directly calculated without generating the candidate patterns. The OMCP algorithm only needs to execute once to get the PI of all patterns, without re-executing when the PI threshold is adjusted. Our algorithm is performed on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate that the OMCP algorithm improvements in efficiency of co-location pattern mining.