Fusion and clustering algorithms for spatial data

Spatial clustering is an approach for discovering groups of related data points in spatial data. Spatial clustering has attracted a lot of research attention due to various applications where it is needed. It holds practical importance in application domains such as geographic knowledge discovery, sensors, rare disease discovery, astronomy, remote sensing, and so on. The motivation for this work stems from the limitations of the existing spatial clustering methods. In most conventional spatial clustering algorithms, the similarity measurement mainly considers the geometric attributes. However, in many real applications, users are concerned about both the spatial and the non-spatial attributes. In conventional spatial clustering, the input data set is partitioned into several compact regions and data points that are similar to one another in their non-spatial attributes may be scattered over different regions, thus making the corresponding objective difficult to achieve.; In this dissertation, a novel clustering methodology is proposed to explore the clustering problem within both spatial and non-spatial domains by employing a fusion-based approach. The goal is to optimize a given objective function in the spatial domain, while satisfying the constraint specified in the non-spatial attribute domain. Several experiments are conducted to provide insights into the proposed methodology. The algorithm first captures the spatial cores having the highest structure and then employs an iterative, heuristic mechanism to find the optimal number of spatial cores and non-spatial clusters that exist in the data. Such a fusion-based framework allows for the handling of data streams and provides a framework for comparing spatial clusters. The correctness and efficiency of the proposed clustering model is demonstrated on real world and synthetic data sets.