Spatial and Temporal Data Mining in Census of Population and Housing

Many events repeat themselves as the time goes by. Our environment has temporal and spatial properties and also can be very complicated. The aim is discovering association patterns behind the multidimensional environment. The data mining technology is a comprehensive suite of libraries that implement many machine learning algorithms. The process of mining technology will solve these problems. Applications constructed from the model can be allowing users to apply techniques to their own data. This paper describes the spatial and temporal data mining process and model in census of population and housing. Introduction City planners need to project the size of the population five, ten, or twenty years into the future to decide how the housing supply, parks and recreation facilities, and water and sewer capacity will need to change to accommodate population growth. Projecting population relies on several pieces of information about the current population: What is the age, sex, race, and ethnic makeup of the current population? How will current birth and death rates affect rates of natural increase? How much population change in the past decade was the result of migration? What is the current household size for different population cohorts? How are household formation rates likely to change in the future? Planners, human service providers, school districts, and several other special-purpose public and private agencies rely on the descriptive detail provided by the census, along with the count of population. Planning future service provision, writing grant proposals, and designing programs all require data to justify the choice of priorities. Understanding the spatial distribution of target groups is key to delivering services effectively. The Census of Population and Housing is the single most comprehensive source of population data available at a fine spatial scale. Estimates of annual changes will be more accurate. The decennial census does not provide a perfect count of either the population as a whole or its subgroups. Some groups of people, especially recent migrants and minorities, are clearly undercounted, although a variety of statistical techniques are used to correct for this. Because the census is address-based, it is quite inadequate as a count of people who have no fixed address, and no statistical adjustments have been developed to address this deficiency. Understanding these limitations is necessary if we are to use the data appropriately. The examples present solutions to two common spatial challenges—identifying trends over time when census geography has changed, and identifying characteristics of neighborhoods that may not coincide with census tract boundaries. Spatial Trend A geographic database may be used by economic geographers to discover spatial characterizations of the economic power or other interesting properties of communities. Some non-spatial attribute such as the unemployment rate is chosen as a relevant indicator. The database was used for an experimental performance evaluation of the algorithms (Ester el al. 1998). The characterization algorithm usually starts with a small set of target objects, selected for instance by a condition on some non-spatial attributes such as proportion of retired persons. A characterization rule is generated describing the target regions. Informally, this rule states that retirees prefer somewhat rural areas close to the mountains. Note that not only some non-spatial attributes, but also the neighborhood of mountains are significant for the characterization of the target regions. Economic geographers may be interested in discovering spatial trends of various properties of communities such as the economic power. In the following, we illustrate the potential of spatial trend detection which was used for an experimental performance evaluation of the algorithms (Ester et al. 1998). For example, linear or exponential, used for the regression and let filter be one of the filters for neighborhood paths. Let min-conf be a real number and let min-length as well as max-length be natural numbers. The task of spatial trend detection is to discover the set of all neighborhood paths and having a trend in attributes with a correlation of at least min-conf. The paths have to satisfy the filter and their length must be between min-length and max-length. Definition allows different specializations. Either the set of all discovered neighborhood paths, or each of its elements, must have a trend of the specified type. For each of these specializations, we present an algorithm in figure 1 to discover such spatial trends. Algorithm detect trends: detect-global-trends(graph G ; object o; attribute a; type t; real min-conf, integer min-length,max-length; filter f) Initialize a list of paths to the set extensions (G, {path(o)}, min-length,f); Initialize an empty set of observations; Initialize last-correlation and last-paths as NULL; initialize first-pos to 1; Initialize last-pos to min-length; while paths is not empty do for each path in paths do for object from first-pos of path to last-pos of path do calculate diff as a (object) a(o) and calculate dist as dist(object,o); insert the tuple (diff, dist) into the set of observations; perform a regression of type t on the set of observations; if abs(correlation) of the resulting regression function min-conf then set last-paths to paths and last-correlation to correlation; set last-slope to the slope of the resulting regression function; if length (paths) < max-length then replace the paths by the set extensions (G paths, length (paths) + 1, f); increment last-pos by 1; set first-pos to last-pos; else set paths to the empty list; else return last-paths, last-correlation and last-slope; return last-paths, last-correlation and last-slope; Figure 1. Algorithm detect trends (Ester, M., Kriegel.2001) The algorithm discovers global trends that is trends for the whole set of all neighborhood paths having a length in the specified interval. Algorithm detect trends perform a breadth-first search of the set of all neighborhood paths and it is outlined. The algorithm creates all neighborhood paths of the same length simultaneously starting with min-length and continuing until max-length. The regression is performed once for each of these sets of all paths of the same length. If no trend of length l with abs(correlation) > min-conf is detected, then the path extensions of length l + 1, l + 2,. , max-length are not created due to efficiency reasons. The parameter min-length has to be chosen large enough because a trend may become significant only at a certain minimum length of a neighborhood path. The algorithm returns the set of neighborhood paths of the maximum length having a trend with abs(correlation) > min-conf. The slope of the regression function and its correlation coefficient are returned. The slope describes the degree of change of the specified attribute when moving away; a large slope is found for a quickly changing attribute whereas a small slope indicates that the attribute changes only slowly in the neighborhood. The correlation coefficient measures the confidence of the discovered trend the larger the correlation coefficient the better can the observations be approximated by the regression function and the higher is the confidence of the discovered trend. Spatial classification The task of classification is to assign an object to a class from a given set of classes based on the attribute values of the object. In spatial classification the attribute values of neighboring objects may also be relevant for the membership of objects and therefore have to be considered as well. Ester et al (1997) proposed a spatial classification algorithm based on the well-known ID3 algorithm (Quinlan 1986) which was designed for relational databases. The extension to spatial attributes is to consider also the attribute of objects on a neighborhood path starting from the current object. The generalized attribute economic power, for example, represents the attribute economic-power of some direct neighbor. Because it is reasonable to assume that the influence of neighboring objects and their attributes decreases with increasing distance, we can limit the length of the relevant neighborhood paths by an input parameter max-length. Furthermore, the classification algorithm allows the input of a predicate to focus the search for classification rules on the objects of the database fulfilling this predicate. In figure 2 depicts a sample decision tree and two rules derived from it. Economic power has been chosen as the class attributes and the focus is on all objects of type city. In Figure 3, we present the pseudo code of the algorithm for spatial classification which finds all paths from the root to one of the leaves of a decision tree, where all attributes yield an information gain. Note that the algorithm uses a predicate larger distance that is distance (n1,ni+1) > distance (n1, ni) to restrict the creation of neighborhood paths. Rules discovered by the classification algorithm in table 1. Rule 1: IF population of city = low and amount of taxes of city = high THEN Economic power of city = high (80%) Rule 2: IF population of city=high and type of neighbour of city = road and type of neighbour of neighbour of city = airport THEN Economic power of city=high (90%) Table 1. Spatial classification rules Figure 2. Spatial decision tree spatial_classification_rules(db:Set_of_Objects; class_attr:Attribute; NPred:NeighbourhoodRelation; max__length:Int) classify(class_attr, NPredGraph, EMPTY_RULE, paths, max_length); classify(class_attr:Attribute; rule:ClassificationRule; paths:set_of_paths; max_length:Int) max_info_gain:=0.0; max_attr:=NULL; for i from 1 to maxjength do for each generalized attribute (Aj,i) not used in rule do info-gain:=calculate_information_gain (Aj, class_attr, i, paths); if info_gain > max_info_gain then max_attr:=Aj; max_neighbours:=i; max_in