Spatial-Temporal Data Mining for Ocean Science: Data, Methodologies, and Opportunities

With the increasing amount of spatial-temporal~(ST) ocean data, numerous spatial-temporal data mining (STDM) studies have been conducted to address various oceanic issues, e.g., climate forecasting and disaster warning. Compared with typical ST data (e.g., traffic data), ST ocean data is more complicated with some unique characteristics, e.g., diverse regionality and high sparsity. These characteristics make it difficult to design and train STDM models. Unfortunately, an overview of these studies is still missing, hindering computer scientists to identify the research issues in ocean while discouraging researchers in ocean science from applying advanced STDM techniques. To remedy this situation, we provide a comprehensive survey to summarize existing STDM studies in ocean. Concretely, we first summarize the widely-used ST ocean datasets and identify their unique characteristics. Then, typical ST ocean data quality enhancement techniques are discussed. Next, we classify existing STDM studies for ocean into four types of tasks, i.e., prediction, event detection, pattern mining, and anomaly detection, and elaborate the techniques for these tasks. Finally, promising research opportunities are highlighted. This survey will help scientists from the fields of both computer science and ocean science have a better understanding of the fundamental concepts, key techniques, and open challenges of STDM in ocean.