Clustering moving objects

Abstract

Due to the advances in positioning technologies, the real time information of moving objects becomes increasingly available, which has posed new challenges to the database research. As a long-standing technique to identify overall distribution patterns in data, clustering has achieved brilliant successes in analyzing static datasets. In this paper, we study the problem of clustering moving objects, which could catch interesting pattern changes during the motion process and provide better insight into the essence of the mobile data points. In order to catch the spatial-temporal regularities of moving objects and handle large amounts of data, micro-clustering [20] is employed. Efficient techniques are proposed to keep the moving micro-clusters geographically small. Important events such as the collisions among moving micro-clusters are also identified. In this way, high quality moving micro-clusters are dynamically maintained, which leads to fast and competitive clustering result at any given time instance. We validate our approaches with a through experimental evaluation, where orders of magnitude improvement on running time is observed over normal K-Means clustering method [14].