Spatial data mining, i.e., discovery of interesting, imphcit knowledge in spatial databases, is an important task for understanding and use of spatial data- and knowledge-bases. In this paper, an efficient method for mining strong spatial association rules in geographic information databases is proposed and studied. A spatial association rule is a rule indicating certain association relationship
... [Show full abstract] among a set of spatial and possibly some nonspatial predicates. A strong rule indicates that the patterns in the rule have relatively frequent occurrences in the database and strong imphcation relationships. Several optimization techniques are ex- plored, including a two-step spatial computation technique (approximate computation on large sets, and refined computations on small promising patterns), shared processing in the derivation of large predicates at mul- tiple concept levels, etc. Our analysis shows that interesting association rules can be discovered efficiently in large spatial databases.