Spatial Data Mining

Abstract

Explosive growth in geospatial data and the emergence of new spatial technologies emphasize the need for automated discovery of spatial knowledge. Spatial data mining is the process of discovering interesting and previously unknown, but potentially useful patterns from large spatial databases. The complexity of spatial data and intrinsic spatial rela- tionships limits the usefulness of conventional data mining techniques for extracting spatial patterns. In this chapter, we explore the emerging field of spatial data mining, focusing on four major topics: prediction and classification, outlier detection, co-location mining, and clustering. We conclude with a look at future research needs.