A Vector-Geometry Based Spatial kNN-Algorithm for Traffic Frequency Predictions

We introduce s-kNN, a nearest neighbor based spatial data mining algorithm. It belongs to the class of vector-geometry based algorithms that reason on complex spatial objects instead of point measurements. In contrast to most methods in this class, it does on the fly spatial computations that cannot be replaced by a pre-processing step without sacrificing efficiency. The key is a partial evaluation scheme for efficient computations. The algorithm is fully integrated into an object-relational spatial database. It is the basis for traffic frequency predictions (vehicles and pedestrians) for all German cities larger than 50,000 inhabitants and is the basis for pricing of posters in Germany.