Geometric approach to data mining

In this paper, a new, geometric approach to pattern identification in data mining is presented. It is based on applying string edit distance computation to measuring the similarity between multi-dimensional curves. The string edit distance computation is extended to allow the possibility of using strings, where each element is a vector rather than just a symbol. We discuss an approach for representing 3D-curves using the curvature and the tension as their symbolic representation. This transformation preserves all the information contained in the original 3D-curve. We validate this approach through experiments using synthetic and digitalized data. In particular, the proposed approach is suitable to measure the similarity of 3D-curves invariant under translation, rotation, and scaling. It also can be applied for partial curve matching.