Discovery of Spatial Association Rules in Geographic Information Databases

Spatial data mining i e discovery of interesting implicit knowledge in spatial databases is an important task for understanding and use of spatial data and knowledge bases In this paper an e cient method for mining strong spatial association rules in geographic infor mation databases is proposed and studied A spatial association rule is a rule indicating certain association relationship among a set of spatial and possibly some nonspatial predicates A strong rule indicates that the pat terns in the rule have relatively frequent occurrences in the database and strong implication relationships Several optimization techniques are ex plored including a two step spatial computation technique approximate computation on large sets and re ned computations on small promising patterns shared processing in the derivation of large predicates at mul tiple concept levels etc Our analysis shows that interesting association rules can be discovered e ciently in large spatial databases