Mining spatio-temporal association rules, sources, sinks, stationary regions and thoroughfares in object mobility databases

As mobile devices proliferate and networks become more locationaware, the corresponding growth in spatio-temporal data will demand analysis techniques to mine patterns that take into account the semantics of such data. Association Rule Mining has been one of the more extensively studied data mining techniques, but it considers discrete transactional data (supermarket or sequential). Most attempts to apply this technique to spatial-temporal domains maps the data to transactions, thus losing the spatio-temporal characteristics. We provide a comprehensive definition of spatio-temporal association rules (STARs) that describe how objects move between regions over time. We define support in the spatio-temporal domain to effectively deal with the semantics of such data. We also introduce other patterns that are useful for mobility data; stationary regions and high traffic regions. The latter consists of sources, sinks and thorough-fares. These patterns describe important temporal characteristics of regions and we show that they can be considered as special STARs. We provide efficient algorithms to find these patterns by exploiting several pruning properties¹.