Density-based clustering techniques are used in a wide range of data mining applications. One of their most attractive features con- sists in not making use of prior knowledge of the number of clusters that a dataset contains along with their shape. In this paper we propose a new algorithm named Linear DBSCAN (Lin-DBSCAN), a simple approach to clustering inspired by the density model introduced with the well known algorithm DBSCAN. Designed to minimize the computational cost of density based clustering on geospatial data, Lin-DBSCAN features a linear time complexity that makes it suitable for real-time applications on low-resource devices. Lin-DBSCAN uses a discrete version of the density model of DBSCAN that takes ad- vantage of a grid-based scan and merge approach. The name of the algorithm stems exactly from its main features outlined above. The algorithm was tested with well known data sets. Experimental results prove the efficiency and the validity of this approach over DBSCAN in the context of spatial data clustering, enabling the use of a density-based clustering technique on large datasets with low computational cost.
The R-tree, one of the most popular access methods for rectangles, is based on the heuristic optimization of the area of the enclosing rectangle in each inner node. By running numerous experiments in a standardized testbed under highly varying data, queries and operations, we were able to design the R * -tree which incorporates a combined optimization of area, margin and overlap of each enclosing rectangle in the directory. Using our standardized testbed in an exhaustive performance comparison, it turned out that the R * -tree clearly outperforms the existing R-tree variants. Guttman's linear and quadratic R-tree and Greene's variant of the R-tree. This superiority of the R * -tree holds for different types of queries and operations, such as map overlay, for both rectangles and multidimensional points in all experiments. From a practical point of view the R * -tree is very attractive because of the following two reasons 1 it efficiently supports point and spatial data at the same time and 2 its implementation cost is only slightly higher than that of other R-trees. Search operations in databases require special support at the physical level. This is true for conventional databases as well as spatial databases, where typical search operations include the point query (find all objects that contain a given search point) and the region query (find all objects that overlap a given search region). More than ten years of spatial database research have resulted in a great variety of multidimensional access methods to support such operations. We give an overview of that work. After a brief survey of spatial data management in general, we first present the class of point access methods , which are used to search sets of points in two or more dimensions. The second part of the paper is devoted to spatial access methods to handle extended objects, such as rectangles or polyhedra. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and experimental results concerning the relative performance of various approaches.