On discovering moving clusters in spatio-temporal data

  • Authors:
  • Panos Kalnis;Nikos Mamoulis;Spiridon Bakiras

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore;Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • SSTD'05 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

A moving cluster is defined by a set of objects that move close to each other for a long time interval. Real-life examples are a group of migrating animals, a convoy of cars moving in a city, etc. We study the discovery of moving clusters in a database of object trajectories. The difference of this problem compared to clustering trajectories and mining movement patterns is that the identity of a moving cluster remains unchanged while its location and content may change over time. For example, while a group of animals are migrating, some animals may leave the group or new animals may enter it. We provide a formal definition for moving clusters and describe three algorithms for their automatic discovery: (i) a straight-forward method based on the definition, (ii) a more efficient method which avoids redundant checks and (iii) an approximate algorithm which trades accuracy for speed by borrowing ideas from the MPEG-2 video encoding. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our techniques and their applicability to large spatio-temporal datasets.