Merging spatial and temporal clusters

Question

I've items that have a geo-spatial position and a temporal origin. For both dimensions, I build clusters so far.

I'm now in search of a way to merge this different clusters forming spatio-temporal clusters. Of course, I want to prevent calculating completely new clusters from the scratch and rather use the existing information through the previous clustering.

Is there any algorithm how to build 3d clusters by merging a previous 1d and a 2d clustering process?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don’t know if I understood your question correctly, but I’ll give it a try. Any hierarchical agglomerative algorithm can do the job. Remember that agglomerative algorithms proceed by “pasting” observations to a cluster and treating the cluster as a single unit.

I would suggest this:

1. Substitute your 1d or 2d observations with the clusters’ centroids.

2. Use a distance to assign the temporal observations into the 1d/2d cluster. (Euclidean distance might work).

Hope this works =)