A scaled space-filling curve index applied to tropical rain forest tree distributions
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In order to be able to process the increasing amount of spatial data, efficient methods for their handling need to be developed. One major challenge for big spatial data is access. This can be achieved through space-filling curves, as they have the property that nearby points on the curve are also nearby in space. It is demonstrated on a tropical rain forest tree data set of 2.5 million points taken from a multi-dimensional space that the recently constructed scaled Gray-Hilbert curve index performs better than its standard static version, saving a significant amount of space for a projection of the data set onto 8 attributes. The relative efficiency of the scaled Gray-Hilbert curve in comparison with the best static version is seen to depend on the distribution of the point cloud. A local sparsity measure derived from properties of the corresponding trees can distinguish point clouds with different tail distributions.
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