STING+: an approach to active spatial data mining

Spatial data mining presents new challenges due to the large size of spatial data, the complexity of spatial data types, and the special nature of spatial access methods. Most research in this area has focused on efficient query processing of static data. This paper introduces an active spatial data mining approach which extends the current spatial data mining algorithms to efficiently support user-defined triggers on dynamically evolving spatial data. To exploit the locality of the effect of an update and the nature of spatial data, we employ a hierarchical structure with associated statistical information at the various levels of the hierarchy and decompose the user-defined trigger into a set of sub-triggers associated with cells in the hierarchy. Updates are suspended in the hierarchy until their cumulative effect might cause the trigger to fire. It is shown that this approach achieves three orders of magnitude improvement over the naive approach that re-evaluates the condition over the database for each update, while both approaches produce the same result without any delay. Moreover this scheme can support incremental query processing as well.