Abstract

Abstract. In many application domains, occurrences of related spatial features may exhibit co-location pattern. For example, some disease may be in spatial proximity of certain type of pollution. This paper studies the problem of regional co-locations with arbitrary shapes. Regional colocations represent regions in which two spatial features exhibit stronger or weaker co-location than that in other regions. Finding regional colocations of arbitrary shapes is very challenging because: (1) statistical frameworks for mining regional co-location do not exist; and (2) testing all possible arbitrary shaped regions is computational prohibitive even for very small dataset. In this paper, we propose frequentist and Bayesian frameworks for mining regional co-locations and develop a probabilistic expansion heuristic to find arbitrary shaped regions. Experimental results on synthetic and real world data show that both frequentist method and Bayesian statistical approach can recover the region with arbitrary shapes. Our approaches outperform baseline algorithms in terms of F measure. Bayesian statistical approach is approximately three orders of magnitude faster than the frequentist approach. 1