A polygon-based clustering and analysis framework for mining spatial datasets

Polygons provide natural representations for many types of geospatial objects, such as countries, buildings, and pollution hotspots. Thus, polygon-based data mining techniques are particularly useful for mining geospatial datasets. In this paper, we propose a polygon-based clustering and analysis framework for mining multiple geospatial datasets that have inherently hidden relations. In this framework, polygons are first generated from multiple geospatial point datasets by using a density-based contouring algorithm called DCONTOUR. Next, a density-based clustering algorithm called Poly-SNN with novel dissimilarity functions is employed to cluster polygons to create meta-clusters of polygons. Finally, post-processing analysis techniques are proposed to extract interesting patterns and user-guided summarized knowledge from meta-clusters. These techniques employ plug-in reward functions that capture a domain expert’s notion of interestingness to guide the extraction of knowledge from meta-clusters. The effectiveness of our framework is tested in a real-world case study involving ozone pollution events in Texas. The experimental results show that our framework can reveal interesting relationships between different ozone hotspots represented by polygons; it can also identify interesting hidden relations between ozone hotspots and several meteorological variables, such as outdoor temperature, solar radiation, and wind speed.