A general method of spatio-temporal clustering analysis

Spatio-temporal clustering has been a hot topic in the field of spatio-temporal data mining and knowledge discovery. It can be employed to uncover and interpret developmental trends of geographic phenomenon in the real world. However, existing spatio-temporal clustering methods seldom consider both spatiotemporal autocorrelations and heterogeneities among spatio-temporal entities, and the coupling in space and time has not been well highlighted. In this paper, a unified framework for the clustering analysis of spatio-temporal data is proposed, and a novel spatio-temporal clustering algorithm is developed by means of a spatio-temporal statistics methodology and intelligence computation technology. Our method is applied successfully to finding spatio-temporal cluster in China's annual temperature database for the period 1951-1992.