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A grid-based clustering algorithm for wild bird distribution

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Abstract

Advanced satellite tracking technologies provide biologists with long-term location sequence data to understand movement of wild birds then to find explicit correlation between dynamics of migratory birds and the spread of avian influenza. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical clustering algorithm based on a recursive grid partition and kernel density estimation (KDE) to hierarchically identify wild bird habitats with different densities. We hierarchically cluster the GPS data by taking into account the following observations: 1) the habitat variation on a variety of geospatial scales; 2) the spatial variation of the activity patterns of birds in different stages of the migration cycle. In addition, we measure the site fidelity of wild birds based on clustering. To assess effectiveness, we have evaluated our system using a large-scale GPS dataset collected from 59 birds over three years. As a result, our approach can identify the hierarchical habitats and distribution of wild birds more efficiently than several commonly used algorithms such as DBSCAN and DENCLUE.

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Correspondence to Yuanchun Zhou.

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Yuwei Wang is a PhD candidate in University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research activities are focused on visual analytics and visual data mining. He is currently working on analysis and visualization of animal migration, and e-Science applications.

Yuanchun Zhou is an associate professor in the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2006. His main research interests include data mining, and data intensive computing. He has published over 50 papers in international journals and conferences.

Ying Liu received her BS from Peking University, China, in 1999, and her MS and PhD from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, in Computer Engineering in 2001 and 2005, respectively. She is currently an associate professor in University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she also holds an adjunct appointment with Fictitious Economy and Data Science Research Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include data mining, high-performance computing, and business intelligence.

Ze Luo is an associate professor in the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2005. His interests include scientific computing grid, e-Science, and data mining.

Danhuai Guo is an associate professor in the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD from the Institute of Remote Sensing and Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2009. His main research interests include spatio-temporal data mining, spatial and temporal Analysis, GIS and public health, and high performance GIS. He has published more than 20 peer reviewed papers in international journals and conferences. Jing Shao received his MS in Computer Science from the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research activities are focused on data mining and machine learning. He is currently working on species distribution modeling and e-Science applications.

Fei Tan is a graduate student in Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests lie primarily in data mining, and NLP and related applications. He is currently using data mining to discover patterns in ecological data.

Liang Wu received his BS from the School of Software Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2011. He is a master’s student in the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests include text mining and trajectory mining.

Jianhui Li is a professor in the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007. His main research interests include large-scale distributed databases management and integration, semantic-based data integration, and data intensive computing and scientific applications.

Baoping Yan is a professor and chief engineer in the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to this, she served as vice president of Dawning Information Industry. She has completed analysis and design of computer network systems, research and implementation of industrial automation and CIMS network technology, ATM-based workstation cluster systems, standard management of large-scale networks and system integration, Internet/Intranet comprehensive information management systems, etc. Currently, she is responsible for the planning and construction of the informatization of the Chinese Academy of Sciences during the 10th Five-year Plan period. She has published more than 50 research papers at home and abroad. The government has granted her special allowance for her outstanding contributions.

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Wang, Y., Zhou, Y., Liu, Y. et al. A grid-based clustering algorithm for wild bird distribution. Front. Comput. Sci. 7, 475–485 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-013-2223-2

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