Knowledge discovery process for description of spatially referenced clusters

Abstract

Spatial clustering is an important field of spatial data mining and knowledge discovery that serves to partition a spatial data set to obtain disjoint subsets with spatial elements that are similar to each other. Existing algorithms can be used to perform three types of cluster analyses, including clustering of spatial points, regionalization and point pattern analysis. However, all these existing methods do not provide a description of the discovered spatial clusters, which is useful for decision making in many different fields. This work proposes a knowledge discovery process for the description of spatially referenced clusters that uses decision tree learning algorithms. Two proofs of concept of the proposed process using different spat ial clustering algorithm on real data are also provided.