MDST-DBSCAN: A Density-Based Clustering Method for Multidimensional Spatiotemporal Data

Abstract

The increasing use of mobile devices and the growing popularity of location-based ser-vices have generated massive spatiotemporal data over the last several years. While it provides new opportunities to enhance our understanding of various urban dynamics, it poses challenges at the same time due to the complex structure and large-volume characteristic of the spatiotemporal data. To facilitate the process and analysis of such spatiotemporal data, various data mining and clustering methods have been proposed, but there still needs to develop a more flexible and computationally efficient method. The purpose of this paper is to present a clustering method that can work with large-scale, multidimensional spatiotemporal data in a reliable and efficient manner. The proposed method, called MDST-DBSCAN, is applied to idealized patterns and a real data set, and the results from both examples demonstrate that it can identify clusters accurately within a reasonable amount of time. MDST-DBSCAN performs well on both spatial and spatiotemporal data, and it can be particularly useful for exploring massive spatiotemporal data, such as detailed real estate transactions data in Seoul, Korea.