A Novel Approach for Mining Spatiotemporal Explicit and Implicit Information in Multiscale Spatiotemporal Data

Abstract

In the era of big data, a significant volume of spatiotemporal data exists in a multiscale format, describing diverse phenomena in the objective world across different spatial and temporal scales. While existing methods focus on analyzing the features and connections of spatiotemporal data at various scales, they often overlook the consideration of uncertainty in spatiotemporal information within the context of multiscale meaning. To effectively harness the potential of spatiotemporal data, it becomes crucial to capture the fuzzy spatiotemporal information inherent in multiscale datasets. This paper proposes a novel multiscale spatiotemporal correlation method that accounts for and quantifies the uncertainty of spatiotemporal information. Spatiotemporal information is categorized into two types, explicit information and implicit information, based on respective levels of uncertainty. The method employs spatiotemporal cubes to interpret the spatiotemporal items within the data, followed by the introduction of a benchmark scale to determine the certainty of each spatiotemporal item based on its range and topological relationships. Subsequently, spatiotemporal confidence and correlation index are proposed to gauge the significance of geographical elements and their interrelationships. To validate the proposed method, a multiscale spatiotemporal transaction dataset is generated and utilized in the experiment. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively captures spatiotemporal implicit information and enables better utilization of multiscale spatiotemporal data. Notably, the importance of each object of study varies when analyzed using different benchmark scales, providing valuable insights for professionals to identify novel objects and associations worthy of consideration. The obtained results can be used to construct spatiotemporal knowledge graphs.