An Efficient Probabilistic Algorithm to Detect Periodic Patterns in Spatio-Temporal Datasets

Deriving insight from data is a challenging task for researchers and practitioners, especially when working on spatio-temporal domains. If pattern searching is involved, the complications introduced by temporal data dimensions create additional obstacles, as traditional data mining techniques are insufficient to address spatio-temporal databases (STDBs). We hereby present a new algorithm, which we refer to as F1/FP, and can be described as a probabilistic version of the Minus-F1 algorithm to look for periodic patterns. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has compared the most cited algorithms in the literature to look for periodic patterns—namely, Apriori, MS-Apriori, FP-Growth, Max-Subpattern, and PPA. Thus, we have carried out such comparisons and then evaluated our algorithm empirically using two datasets, showcasing its ability to handle different types of periodicity and data distributions. By conducting such a comprehensive comparative analysis, we have demonstrated that our newly proposed algorithm has a smaller complexity than the existing alternatives and speeds up the performance regardless of the size of the dataset. We expect our work to contribute greatly to the mining of astronomical data and the permanently growing online streams derived from social media.