Discovery of Spatiotemporal Event Sequences

Finding frequent patterns plays a vital role in many analytics tasks such as finding itemsets, associations, correlations, and sequences. In recent decades, spatiotemporal frequent pattern mining has emerged with the main goal focused on developing data-driven analysis frameworks for understanding underlying spatial and temporal characteristics in massive datasets. In this thesis, we will focus on discovering spatiotemporal event sequences from large-scale region trajectory datasetes with event annotations. Spatiotemporal event sequences are the series of event types whose trajectory-based instances follow each other in spatiotemporal context. We introduce new data models for storing and processing evolving region trajectories, provide a novel framework for modeling spatiotemporal follow relationships, and present novel spatiotemporal event sequence mining algorithms

Spatio-temporal patterns of human mobility from geo-social networks for urban computing: Analysis, models & applications

The availability of rich information about fine-grained user mobility in urban environments from increasingly geographically-aware social networking services and the rapid development of machine learning applications greatly facilitate the investigation of urban issues. In this setting, urban computing emerges intending to tackle a variety of challenges faced by cities nowadays and to offer promising approaches to improving our living environment. Leveraging massive amounts of data from geo-social networks with unprecedented richness, we show how to devise novel algorithmic techniques to reveal underlying urban mobility patterns for better policy-making and more efficient mobile applications in this dissertation. Building upon the foundation of existing research efforts in urban computing field and basic machine learning techniques, in this dissertation, we propose a general framework of urban computing with geo-social network data and develop novel algorithms tailored for three urban computing tasks. We begin by exploring how the transition data recording human movements between urban venues from geo-social networks can be aggregated and utilised to detect spatio-temporal changes of local graphs in urban areas. We further explore how this can be used as a proxy to track and predict socio-economic deprivation changes as government financial effort is put in developing areas by supervised machine learning methods. We then study how to extract latent patterns from collective user-venue interactions with the help of a spatio-temporal aware topic modeling approach for the benefit of urban infrastructure planning. After that, we propose a model to detect the gap between user-side demand and venue-side supply levels for certain types of services in urban environments to suggest further policymaking and investment optimisation. Finally, we address a mobility prediction task, the application aim of which is to recommend new places to explore in the city for mobile users. To this end, we develop a deep learning framework that integrates memory network and topic modeling techniques. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed architecture can enhance the prediction performance in various recommendation scenarios with high interpretability. All in all, the insights drawn and the techniques developed in this dissertation make a substantial step in addressing issues in cities and open the door to future possibilities in the promising urban computing area

GI Systems for public health with an ontology based approach

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.Health is an indispensable attribute of human life. In modern age, utilizing technologies for health is one of the emergent concepts in several applied fields. Computer science, (geographic) information systems are some of the interdisciplinary fields which motivates this thesis. Inspiring idea of the study is originated from a rhetorical disease DbHd: Database Hugging Disorder, defined by Hans Rosling at World Bank Open Data speech in May 2010. The cure of this disease can be offered as linked open data, which contains ontologies for health science, diseases, genes, drugs, GEO species etc. LOD-Linked Open Data provides the systematic application of information by publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. In the context of this study we aimed to reduce boundaries between semantic web and geo web. For this reason a use case data is studied from Valencia CSISP- Research Center of Public Health in which the mortality rates for particular diseases are represented spatio-temporally. Use case data is divided into three conceptual domains (health, spatial, statistical), enhanced with semantic relations and descriptions by following Linked Data Principles. Finally in order to convey complex health-related information, we offer an infrastructure integrating geo web and semantic web. Based on the established outcome, user access methods are introduced and future researches/studies are outlined

Analyse et fouille de données de trajectoires d'objets mobiles

In this thesis, we explore two problems related to managing and mining moving object trajectories. First, we study the problem of sampling trajectory data streams. Storing the entirety of the trajectories provided by modern location-aware devices can entail severe storage and processing overheads. Therefore, adapted sampling techniques are necessary in order to discard unneeded positions and reduce the size of the trajectories while still preserving their key spatiotemporal features. In streaming environments, this process needs to be conducted "on-the-fly" since the data are transient and arrive continuously. To this end, we introduce a new sampling algorithm called spatiotemporal stream sampling (STSS). This algorithm is computationally-efficient and guarantees an upper bound for the approximation error introduced during the sampling process. Experimental results show that stss achieves good performances and can compete with more sophisticated and costly approaches. The second problem we study is clustering trajectory data in road network environments. We present three approaches to clustering such data: the first approach discovers clusters of trajectories that traveled along the same parts of the road network; the second approach is segment-oriented and aims to group together road segments based on trajectories that they have in common; the third approach combines both aspects and simultaneously clusters trajectories and road segments. We show how these approaches can be used to reveal useful knowledge about flow dynamics and characterize traffic in road networks. We also provide experimental results where we evaluate the performances of our propositions.Dans un premier temps, nous étudions l'échantillonnage de flux de trajectoires. Garder l'intégralité des trajectoires capturées par les terminaux de géo-localisation modernes peut s'avérer coûteux en espace de stockage et en temps de calcul. L'élaboration de techniques d'échantillonnage adaptées devient primordiale afin de réduire la taille des données en supprimant certaines positions tout en veillant à préserver le maximum des caractéristiques spatiotemporelles des trajectoires originales. Dans le contexte de flux de données, ces techniques doivent en plus être exécutées "à la volée" et s'adapter au caractère continu et éphémère des données. A cet effet, nous proposons l'algorithme STSS (spatiotemporal stream sampling) qui bénéficie d'une faible complexité temporelle et qui garantit une borne supérieure pour les erreurs d’échantillonnage. Nous montrons les performances de notre proposition en la comparant à d'autres approches existantes. Nous étudions également le problème de la classification non supervisée de trajectoires contraintes par un réseau routier. Nous proposons trois approches pour traiter ce cas. La première approche se focalise sur la découverte de groupes de trajectoires ayant parcouru les mêmes parties du réseau routier. La deuxième approche vise à grouper des segments routiers visités très fréquemment par les mêmes trajectoires. La troisième approche combine les deux aspects afin d'effectuer un co-clustering simultané des trajectoires et des segments. Nous démontrons comment ces approches peuvent servir à caractériser le trafic et les dynamiques de mouvement dans le réseau routier et réalisons des études expérimentales afin d'évaluer leurs performances