Moving objects: Combining gradual rules and spatio-temporal patterns

Mining gradual patterns plays a crucial role in many real world applications where very large and complex numerical data must be handled, e.g., biological databases, survey databases, data streams or sensor readings. Gradual rules highlight complex order correlations of the form The more/less X, then the more/less Y. Such rules have been studied for a long time and recently scalable algorithm has been proposed to address the issue. However, mining gradual patterns remains challenging in mobile object applications. In the other hand, mining frequent moving objects patterns is also very useful in many applications such as traffic management, mobile commerce, animals tracking. Those two techniques are very efficient to discover interesting rules and patterns; however, in some aspect, each individual technique could not help us to fully understand and discover interesting items and patterns. In this paper, we present a novel concept in that gradual pattern and spatio-temporal pattern are combined together to extract gradual-spatio-temporal rules. We also propose a novel algorithm, named GSTD, to extract such rules. Conducted experiments on a real dataset show that new kinds of patterns can be extracted.