Correspondence clustering: an approach to cluster multiple related spatial datasets

Domain experts are frequently interested to analyze multiple related spatial datasets. This capability is important for change analysis and contrast mining. In this paper, a novel clustering approach called correspondence clustering is introduced that clusters two or more spatial datasets by maximizing cluster interestingness and correspondence between clusters derived from different datasets. A representative-based correspondence clustering framework and clustering algorithms are introduced. In addition, the paper proposes a novel cluster similarity assessment measure that relies on re-clustering techniques and co-occurrence matrices. We conducted experiments in which two earthquake datasets had to be clustered by maximizing cluster interestingness and agreement between the spatial clusters obtained. The results show that correspondence clustering can reduce the variance inherent to representative-based clustering algorithms, which is important for reducing the likelihood of false positives in change analysis. Moreover, high agreements could be obtained by only slightly lowering cluster quality.