Spatio-temporal patterns of seasonal rainfall in Spain (1912-2000) using cluster and principal component analysis: comparison

In this work, cluster and principal component analysis are used to divide Spain in a limited number of climatically homogeneous zones, based on seasonal rainfall for 32 Spanish localities for the period 1912–2000. Using the hierarchical technique of clustering Ward's method, three clusters have been obtained in winter and spring, and four clusters have been obtained in summer and autumn. Results are similar to those obtained by applying principal component analysis. Centroid series of each cluster and principal component series of each EOF have been compared to analyze the temporal patterns. The comparison of both methods indicates that cluster analysis is suitable to establish spatio-temporal patterns of seasonal rainfall distribution in Spain.<br><br> <b>Key words.</b> Meteorology and atmospheric dynamics (climatology; precipitation; general or miscellaneous

Large-scale unsupervised spatio-temporal semantic analysis of vast regions from satellite images sequences

Temporal sequences of satellite images constitute a highly valuable and abundant resource for analyzing regions of interest. However, the automatic acquisition of knowledge on a large scale is a challenging task due to different factors such as the lack of precise labeled data, the definition and variability of the terrain entities, or the inherent complexity of the images and their fusion. In this context, we present a fully unsupervised and general methodology to conduct spatio-temporal taxonomies of large regions from sequences of satellite images. Our approach relies on a combination of deep embeddings and time series clustering to capture the semantic properties of the ground and its evolution over time, providing a comprehensive understanding of the region of interest. The proposed method is enhanced by a novel procedure specifically devised to refine the embedding and exploit the underlying spatio-temporal patterns. We use this methodology to conduct an in-depth analysis of a 220 km2 region in northern Spain in different settings. The results provide a broad and intuitive perspective of the land where large areas are connected in a compact and well-structured manner, mainly based on climatic, phytological, and hydrological factors

Cortical spatio-temporal dimensionality reduction for visual grouping

The visual systems of many mammals, including humans, is able to integrate the geometric information of visual stimuli and to perform cognitive tasks already at the first stages of the cortical processing. This is thought to be the result of a combination of mechanisms, which include feature extraction at single cell level and geometric processing by means of cells connectivity. We present a geometric model of such connectivities in the space of detected features associated to spatio-temporal visual stimuli, and show how they can be used to obtain low-level object segmentation. The main idea is that of defining a spectral clustering procedure with anisotropic affinities over datasets consisting of embeddings of the visual stimuli into higher dimensional spaces. Neural plausibility of the proposed arguments will be discussed

Extracting user spatio-temporal profiles from location based social networks

Report de RecercaLocation Based Social Networks (LBSN) like Twitter or Instagram are a good source for user spatio-temporal behavior. These social network provide a low rate sampling of user's location information during large intervals of time that can be used to discover complex behaviors, including mobility profiles, points of interest or unusual events. This information is important for different domains like mobility route planning, touristic recommendation systems or city planning. Other approaches have used the data from LSBN to categorize areas of a city depending on the categories of the places that people visit or to discover user behavioral patterns from their visits. The aim of this paper is to analyze how the spatio-temporal behavior of a large number of users in a well limited geographical area can be segmented in different profiles. These behavioral profiles are obtained by means of clustering algorithms that show the different behaviors that people have when living and visiting a city. The data analyzed was obtained from the public data feeds of Twitter and Instagram inside the area of the city of Barcelona for a period of several months. The analysis of these data shows that these kind of algorithms can be successfully applied to data from any city (or any general area) to discover useful profiles that can be described on terms of the city singular places and areas and their temporal relationships. These profiles can be used as a basis for making decisions in different application domains, specially those related with mobility inside and outside a city.Preprin