KCPMA: k-degree Contact Pattern Mining Algorithms for Moving Objects

During infectious disease outbreaks, tracking contacted objects is important for suppressing the spread of the virus and using trajectories of moving objects to discover contacted objects is one of effective approaches. Existing algorithms focus on individual contact event discovery but lack the ability to obtain the k-degree contact events. In this paper, we propose efficient k-degree contact pattern mining algorithms that are capable of mining k-degree contact events. The definition of k-degree contact event is first formulated. Based on the definition, a sliding window-based baseline k-degree contact pattern mining algorithm (KCPMA) is presented. To improve the mining efficiency, the sample-point checking strategy and R-tree index are adopted and the optimized mining algorithm (KCPMA+) is proposed. Comprehensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are effective and efficient in mining k-degree contact events.