Towards efficient techniques to discover moving flock patterns: How can association rules help?

Andrs Oswaldo Caldern Romero

GEM MSc Program romero23555@itc.nl

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Motivation
More and more geographic and temporal data... more and more difficult to analyse them... Wireless sensor Wireless sensor networks networks GPS GPS

Remote sensing Remote sensing

Spatio-temporal datasets

RFID RFID

Mobile phones Mobile phones

General surveys General surveys

Motivation
An urgent need of new analysis methods... Traditional spatial analyses is not an answer. Spatio-temporal datasets Scalability Accuracy Traditional data mining... Spatial is Special

Motivation
Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GKD) and Spatial Data Mining (SDM)

Guo and Mennis (2009) enumerate 4 categories of SDM: Clustering Classification Association rules Geo-visulization

Motivation
Trajectory datasets They collect the location of moving entities for a given time duration. Relevant due to the characteristics of the objects of interest: animals, pedestrians, vehicles or natural phenomena.

The Space-time cube. GIP Department, ITC

Motivation
Moving flock patterns Vieira et al. (2009) define moving flock patterns as sets of entities moving in the same direction while being close to each other for the duration of a given time interval.

(after Vieira et al., 2009)

Motivation
How can association rules help? Association rule learning is a well researched method for discovering interesting relations among variables in large databases. Used commonly in large transactional databases of big supermarkets to understand how products are purchased together (Larose, 2005). A typical association rule in this case is: 80% of people who bought potato chips and beer, also bought diapers

Han and Kamber, 2006

Motivation
How can association rules help? Association rules and moving flock patterns present interesting similarities:

The main goal is understand how entities or variables 'go together'.

Sets of locations in trajectory datasets are comparable with sets of products in transactional databases.

They share similar problems related to magnitude and pattern generation.

Problem statement
Current algorithms to extract useful moving flock patterns from trajectory datasets are time-consuming. There are two main issues: Proposed algorithms scan the point sets repeatedly, so execution time depends highly on the size of the database.

They are based on candidate generation. To handle and analyse possible patterns have a direct repercussion on the algorithms performance.

Association rule techniques have faced similar size and candidate generation issues, though without considering spatial context.

Research identification
This investigation aims to define a new methodology to mine moving flock patterns in trajectory datasets based on a new paradigm, the frequent pattern approach (Han et al., 2004), used successfully in the association rule task, aiming to reduce the number of scans and candidate patterns.

Research objectives
In order to accomplish this purpose there are three main objectives: 1. To define the appropriate procedure to fit the concept of moving flock patterns in the association rules methodology. 2. To provide a general framework for pattern recognition in moving object datasets based on the methodology proposed. 3. To test the performance of the resulting algorithm using study cases with real datasets.

Related Work
Previous works in detection of moving flock patterns are reported by: Gudmundsson et al. (2006) and Benkert et al. (2008) introduced the use of disks with a predefine ratio (although with an infinite number of possible locations).

Vieira et al. (2009) revealed that a discrete number of locations to place the disk is possible (polynomial time solution). They proposed the Basic Flock Evaluation (BFE) algorithm.

Wachowicz et al. (2010) proposed a new moving flock pattern definition and developed the corresponding algorithm. They use each point as the centre of the disk, reducing the number of combination but it will not find a complete set of flocks.

Related Work
Traditional association rule techniques have treated the repeated scanning and candidate generation using different approaches: Agrawal and Srikant (1994) have applied pruning techniques based on the downward-closure property (a frequent pattern subset should be frequent).

Timaran and Millan (2005) calculated all possible combinations for each record and then stored them in efficient data structures to be counted.

Han et al. (2004) proposed the frequent pattern approach: an intermediate layer which organized and compressed the records in a compact data structure without candidate generation.

BFE Algorithm implementation...

Vieira et al, 2009

BFE Algorithm implementation...

BFE Algorithm implementation...

BFE Algorithm implementation...

BFE Algorithm implementation...

BFE Algorithm implementation...

Can AR help???

Each trajectory can be seen as sets of consecutive disks... Flocks can be seen as subsets of disks 'happening together'...

What is next...
'Transactionizing' the spatial dataset and test the frequent pattern approach algorithm (FP-Growth) with the generated database. Post-processing to the algorithm's output. Checking time consecutiveness and Consistency. Is it possible avoid the disk generation step using a grid???

Thanks for your attention...

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. George Bernard Shaw