A novel method for discovering spatio-temporal clusters of different sizes, shapes, and densities in the presence of noise

The discovery of spatio-temporal clusters in complex spatio-temporal data-sets has been a challenging issue in the domain of spatio-temporal data mining and knowledge discovery. In this paper, a novel spatio-temporal clustering method based on spatio-temporal shared nearest neighbors (STSNN) is proposed to detect spatio-temporal clusters of different sizes, shapes, and densities in spatio-temporal databases with a large amount of noise. The concepts of windowed distance and shared nearest neighbor are utilized to define a novel spatio-temporal density for a spatio-temporal entity with definite mathematical meanings. Then, the density-based clustering strategy is employed to uncover spatio-temporal clusters. The spatio-temporal clustering algorithm developed in this paper is easily implemented and less sensitive to density variation among spatio-temporal entities. Experiments are undertaken on several simulated data-sets to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantage of the STSNN algorithm. Also, the real-world applications on two seismic databases show that the STSNN algorithm has the ability to uncover foreshocks and aftershocks effectively.