Spatial means space, whereas temporal means time. Spatial Data Mining refers to the process of extraction of knowledge, spatial relationships, and exciting patterns that are not explicitly stored in a spatial database. On the other hand, Temporal Data Mining refers to the extraction of knowledge about the occurrence of an event, whether they follow random, cyclic, seasonal variation, etc.
In this article, you will gain information about Spatial and Temporal Data Mining. You will also gain a holistic understanding of Spatial data, its types, temporal data mining, and the difference between Spatial and Temporal Data Mining.
What is Spatial Data?
The data that provides information about a specific geographical area or location is known as Spatial Data. It provides the information that helps identify the location of the feature or the boundary of Earth. Moreover, spatial data can be processed using GIS (Geographical Information System) or Image processing packages.
Types of Spatial Data
` The different types of Spatial Data are as follows:
1) Feature Data
Feature data follows the vector data model. It represents the entity of the real world, i.e., roads, trees, buildings, etc. This information can be visually represented in the form of a point, line, or polygon.
2) Coverage Data
Coverage data follows the raster data model. Coverage Data contains the mapping of continuous data in space and is represented as a range of values in a satellite image, a digital surface model, aerial photographs, etc. The visual representation of coverage data is in the form of a grid or triangulated irregular network.
What is Spatial Data Mining?
Spatial Data Mining is the process of discovering interesting and useful patterns, spatial relationships, which weren’t earlier stored in spatial databases. In spatial data, mining analysts use geographical or spatial information to produce business intelligence or other results. Challenges involved in spatial data mining include identifying patterns or finding relevant objects to the research project.
The general tools used for Spatial data Mining are Clementine See5/C5.0 and Enterprise Miner. These tools are preferable for analyzing scientific and engineering data, astronomical data, multimedia data, genomic data, and web data.
Spatial data must contain:
- Latitude and longitude information.
- UTM easting or northing.
- Other coordinates denote a point’s location in space, which helps in identifying a location.
Apart from this information, it may contain the different types of an attribute that helps identify a geographical location and its characteristics.
What is Temporal Data?
Temporal Data is the data that represent a state in time. It is basically a temporary data that is valid for a prescribed period of time. Data is collected at a particular time to analyze weather patterns, monitor traffics, study demographics, etc.
Temporal data is useful for analyzing the change that is happening over a period of time. This analysis is later used for identifying the potential cause of the changes and thus come up with solutions.
What is Temporal Data Mining?
Temporal Data Mining is the process of extracting useful information from the pool of temporal data. It is concerned with analyzing temporal data to extract and find the temporal patterns and regularities in the datasets.
The various tasks of Temporal Data Mining are as follows:
- Data Characterization and Comparison
- Cluster Analysis
- Classification
- Association rules
- Prediction and Trend Analysis
- Pattern Analysis
The main objective of Temporal Data Mining is to find the temporal patterns, trends, and relations within the data and extract meaningful information from the data to visualize how the data trend has changed over a course of time.
Temporal Data Mining includes the processing of time-series data, and sequences of data to determine and compute the values of the same attributes over multiple time points.
Spatial and Temporal Data Mining: Differences
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The difference between Spatial and Temporal Data Mining can be based on the following characteristics.
1) Concept
Spatial Data Mining is the extraction of information and relationships from geographical data stored in a spatial database.
Temporal Data Mining is the extraction of information from the temporal data to identify the pattern of the data.
2) Type of Data
Spatial Data Mining mainly deals with the Spatial data i.e., location, geo-referenced data, etc.
Temporal Data Mining usually deals with Temporal content from the data pool.
3) Base Logic
Spatial Data Mining needs space information within the data. For example, any data with location coordinates can be treated as a Spatial Data set.
Temporal Data Mining needs time information. For example, any data set containing the events over time can be treated as temporal data.
4) Principle
Spatial Data Mining is based on rules like Association rules, Discriminant rules, characteristic rules, etc.
Temporal Data Mining is based on finding patterns in the data by clustering, association, prediction, and data comparison.
5) Examples
The basic example of Spatial Data Mining is determining the hotspot of any event, unusual locations, etc.
Suppose you want to log the information about the places you have visited in the past year, showing your travel habits and other spending patterns. To do this, you can capture the coordinates of all the places you have visited in the past year and list other attributes such as the place’s name, the purpose of visit, expenditure cost, and so on. After that, you can create a shapefile in Quantum GIS or any other software to visualize the data. You can generate a heatmap that will depict your places more often and analyze your visiting pattern or spending habits.
The basic usage of Temporal Data Mining is to understand the weather changes over a period of time or in comparing the climate changes on the basis of today’s weather vs. ten years back the same day.
As we know Temporal Data Mining is the analysis of time-series data to capture the behavior of data against a period of time. A classic example of Temporal Data Mining is the analysis of stock ticks. You can get the overall history of a particular stock and how it behaves in the past. Based on the past behavior a predictive algorithm can predict the upcoming ups and downs of that stock.
A Summarised Comparison of Spatial and Temporal Data Mining
| Basis for Comparison | Spatial Data Mining | Temporal Data Mining |
| Concept | Extraction of information & relationships from geographical data stored in a spatial database. | Extraction of information from the temporal data to identify the pattern of the data. |
| Type of Data | Spatial data i.e., location, geo-referenced data, etc. | Temporal content from the data pool. |
| Base Logic | It needs space information within the data such as location coordinates, etc. | It needs time information. |
| Principle | Based on rules like Association rules, Discriminant rules, characteristic rules, etc. | Based on finding patterns in the data by clustering, association, prediction, and data comparison. |
| Examples | Determining the hotspot of any event | Understanding the weather changes over a period of time |
Conclusion
In this article, you have learned about Spatial and Temporal Data Mining. This article also provided information on Spatial data, its types, temporal data mining, and the difference between Spatial and Temporal Data Mining.
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Vishal Agarwal is a Data Engineer with 10+ years of experience in the data field. He has designed scalable and efficient data solutions, and his expertise lies in AWS, Azure, Spark, GCP, SQL, Python, and other related technologies. By combining his passion for writing and the knowledge he has acquired over the years, he wishes to help data practitioners solve the day-to-day challenges they face in data engineering. In his article, Vishal applies his analytical thinking and problem-solving approaches to untangle the intricacies of data integration and analysis.
