Spatial Binning for Detection of Regional Patterns
Spatial binning (spatial discretization) discretizes the location values into a small number of groups associated with geographical areas.
The assignment of a location to a group can be done by any of the following methods:
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Reverse geocoding the longitude/latitude coordinates to obtain an address that specifies (for United States locations) the ZIP code, city, state, and country
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Checking a spatial bin table to determine which bin this specific location belongs in
You can then apply Oracle Data Mining techniques to the discretized locations to identify interesting regional patterns or association rules. For example, you might discover that customers in area A prefer regular soda, while customers in area B prefer diet soda.
The following functions and procedures, documented in SDO_SAM Package (Spatial Analysis and Mining), perform operations related to spatial binning: