Spatial association rules study based on buffer analysis

At present, the mainstream of discovering spatial association rules methods are single-theme and multi-theme. Single-theme method has a disadvantage of more human intervention, and multi-theme method, namely co-location pattern, just suits for objects of point type. In this paper, a new discovering spatial association rules method was proposed, which bases on co-location pattern and buffer analysis, and overcomes the shortcomings of previous methods. At same time, this paper also defined the concept of mutual exclusion rules corresponding to association rules. Case study showed the new method can objectively reflect potential relations of spatial objects.