With the proliferation of mobile devices and location-based services,
continuous generation of massive volume of streaming spatial objects (i.e.,
geo-tagged data) opens up new opportunities to address real-world problems by
analyzing them. In this paper, we present a novel continuous bursty region
detection problem that aims to continuously detect a bursty region of a given
size in a specified geographical area from a stream of spatial objects.
Specifically, a bursty region shows maximum spike in the number of spatial
objects in a given time window. The problem is useful in addressing several
real-world challenges such as surge pricing problem in online transportation
and disease outbreak detection. To solve the problem, we propose an exact
solution and two approximate solutions, and the approximation ratio is
41−α​ in terms of the burst score, where α is a parameter
to control the burst score. We further extend these solutions to support
detection of top-k bursty regions. Extensive experiments with real-world data
are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our solutions