Strong Co-Location Pattern Mining Incorporating Multi-Path and Distance Decay Effects

Spatial co-location pattern mining (SCPM) is a sub-field of data mining, which aims to discover the subset of spatial features whose instances are frequently located in proximate areas. SCPM has broad prospects in many applications, such as ecology, public health, smart cities, etc. In recent years, improving and applying SCPM technology with the constraints of road networks has emerged as a prominent research focus. However, existing studies solely focus on the shortest path between instances when assessing the proximity relationships, neglecting other proximity paths, and thus may overlook co-location patterns with strong associations. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel metric called Strong Proximity Score, which integrates both multi-path proximity and distance decay effects to measure the strength of proximity relationships. Additionally, the Minimum First Search (MFS) algorithm is presented, which utilizes the strategy of minimum instance pair search to accelerate the calculation of Strong Proximity Score. Extensive experiments conducted on real datasets of points of interest demonstrate the superiority of the method based on Strong Proximity Score over traditional SCPM methods and confirm the efficiency of MFS algorithm.