Data mining of aviation data: the search for parallel-offset pairs

We have presented a search problem in the field of aviation that may be cast as a data mining application of spatial/temporal data. Although other formulations are available, we selected cluster analysis to solve the problem. Cluster analysis allowed an ease of conceptualization of the problem, and was available in commercial statistical software packages. Though not intended as a rigorous study of computational complexity, we note that the clustering was 20 times faster than a naive brute-force approach.