A Hybrid Geospatial Data Clustering Method for Hotspot Analysis

Traditional leveraging statistical methods for analyzing today’s large volumes of spatial data have high computational burdens. To eliminate the deficiency, relatively modern data mining techniques have been recently applied in different spatial analysis tasks with the purpose of autonomous knowledge extraction from high-volume spatial data. Fortunately, geospatial data is considered a proper subject for leveraging data mining techniques. The main purpose of this paper is presenting a hybrid geospatial data clustering mechanism in order to achieve a high performance hotspot analysis method. The method basically works on 2 or 3-dimensional geographic coordinates of different natural and unnatural phenomena. It uses the systematic cooperation of two popular clustering algorithms: the AGlomerative NEStive, as a hierarchical clustering method and κ-means, as a partitional clustering method. It is claimed that the hybrid method will inherit the low time complexity of the κ-means algorithm and also relative independency from user’s knowledge of the AGNES algorithm. Thus, the proposed method is expected to be faster than AGNES algorithm and also more accurate than κ-means algorithm. Finally, the method was evaluated against two popular clustering measurement criteria. The first clustering evaluation criterion is adapted from Fisher’s separability criterion, and the second one is the popular minimum total distance measure. Results of evaluation reveal that the proposed hybrid method results in an acceptable performance. It has a desirable time complexity and also enjoys a higher cluster quality than its parents (AGNES and κ-means). Real-time processing of hotspots requires an efficient approach with low time complexity. So, the problem of time complexity has been taken into account in designing the proposed approach.