Mining fuzzy association rules in spatio-temporal databases

Abstract

A huge amount of geospatial and temporal data have been collected through various networks of environment monitoring stations. For instance, daily precipitation and temperature are observed at hundreds of meteorological stations in Northeastern China. However, these massive raw data from the stations are not fully utilized for meeting the requirements of human decision-making. In nature, the discovery of geographical data mining is the computation of multivariate spatio-temporal correlations through the stages of data mining. In this paper, a procedure of mining association rules in regional climate-changing databases is introduced. The methods of Kriging interpolation, fuzzy cmeans clustering, and Apriori-based logical rules extraction are employed subsequently. Formally, we define geographical spatio-temporal transactions and fuzzy association rules. Innovatively, we make fuzzy data conceptualization by means of fuzzy c-means clustering, and transform fuzzy data items with membership grades into Boolean data items with weights by means ofλ-cut sets. When the algorithm Apriori is executed on Boolean transactions with weights, fuzzy association rules are derived. Fuzzy association rules are more nature than crisp association rules for human cognition about the reality.