Computing information gain for spatial data support

Tao Hong, Ashok Samal, Leen Kiat Soh

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Widespread use of GPS devices and explosion of remotely sensed geospatial images along with cheap storage devices has resulted in vast amounts of data. More recently, with the advent of wireless technology, a large number of sensor networks have been deployed to monitor many human, biological and natural processes. This poses a challenge in many data rich application domains. The problem now is how best to choose the datasets to solve specific problems. Some of the datasets may be redundant and their inclusion in analysis may not only be time consuming, but may lead to erroneous conclusions. We propose the concept of data support as the basis for efficient, cost-effective and intelligent use of geospatial data in order to reduce uncertainty in the analysis and consequently in the results. Data support is defined as the process of determining the information utility of a data source to help decide which one to include or exclude to improve cost-effectiveness in existing data analysis. In this article we use mutual information as the basis of computing data support. The concept of mutual information is defined in information theory as a measure to compute information gain or loss between two disjoint datasets. We use this to compute the optimal datasets in specific applications. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated using an application in the hydrological analysis domain.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM GIS 2008
Pages431-434
Number of pages4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008
Event16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM GIS 2008 - Irvine, CA, United States
Duration: Nov 5 2008Nov 7 2008

Publication series

NameGIS: Proceedings of the ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems

Conference

Conference16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM GIS 2008
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityIrvine, CA
Period11/5/0811/7/08

Keywords

  • Information gain/loss
  • Spatial data support

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Earth-Surface Processes
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Information Systems

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