C 5 . 8 Spatial Analysis

C 5.8 Spatial Analysis Martin Ester Preliminary Draft of August 1, 1998 Both, the number and the size of spatial databases are rapidly growing in applications such as geomarketing, astrophysics and molecular biology. This is mainly due to the amazing progress in scientific instruments such as satellites with remote sensors, telescopes or X-ray crystallography. While a lot of algorithms have been developed for knowledge discovery in relational databases, the field of knowledge discovery in spatial databases has only recently emerged (see [KAH 96] for an overview). In section C 5.8.1, we introduce spatial database systems and some basic operations for mining in such databases. Then, we discuss the major data mining tasks of spatial clustering (C 5.8.2), spatial classification (C 5.8.3) and spatial characterization (C 5.8.4).