Patent ID: 8326834

Claim:
A method of mining co-location patterns, the method comprising: partitioning, by a computer, a set of spatial data into a grid of cells, wherein the spatial data comprises a plurality of instances of a plurality of classes, and wherein the grid represents a non-uniform distribution of the instances in geographic space, and wherein any cell of the grid is a neighboring cell to itself and to any other cell of the grid given a common side or a common vertex; and processing the cells of the grid in a dense space first order where a cell that comprises more of the spatial data is processed before a cell that comprises less of the spatial data, wherein the processing comprises: initializing, by the computer, k≧2, where k is a variable, and step 1 : generating, by the computer and in response to the partitioning and the initializing, size k candidate patterns C k based on size k- 1 patterns P k-1 .