Efficient and Effective Clustering Methods for Spatial Data Mining

Spatial data mining is the discovery of interesting relationships and characteristics that may exist implicitly in spatial databases. In this paper, we explore whether clustering methods have a role to play in spatial data mining. To this end, we develop a new clustering method called CLARANS which is based on randomized search. We also develop two spatial data mining algorithms that use CLARANS. Our analysis and experiments show that with the assistance of CLARANS, these two algorithms are very effective and can lead to discoveries that are difficult to find with current spatial data mining algorithms. Furthermore, experiments conducted to compare the performance of CLARANS with that of existing clustering methods show that CLARANS is the most efficient.