Institut für Informatik, Universität Freiburg


Knowledge Discovery from Tree-Ring Time Series


Summary

Tree-rings reflect climatic and environmental conditions in which the trees have grown. The study of the tree-rings can reveal the events such as floods, forest fires, temperature changes, earthquakes, etc. Besides for the archeology, the analysis of tree-rings time series is used for studying the conditions and needs involved in the growth of forests.

In this project we study the tree-ring time series using the techniques and methods from the field of knowledge discovery and data mining. The problems which are addressed in particular are the discovery of characteristic patterns in tree-ring time series, and the problem of dating tree-ring time series. The discovery of the characteristics patterns can identify the timepoints of the specific events which occurred during the existence of the sample trees. Dating of tree-ring time series is used for determining the age of the sample pieces of wood.

The algorithm for matching the sequences of values with the set of time series has been developed in the frame of the study of tree-ring time series. The algorithm was implemented using C5.0 data mining tools and Perl programming language. The empirical study of the use of matching algorithm for the above stated problems of pattern recognition and dating has been done.


Participants

The work on knowledge discovery from tree-ring time series is performed in the frame of a joint project of Database and Information Systems Group (DBIS) at Institute for Computer Science, and Institute for Forest Growth (IWW), Freiburg University.

DBIS
Prof. Georg Lausen
Dr. Iztok Savnik
Aldar Dougarjapov
IWW
Prof. Heinrich Spiecker
Dr. Hans-Peter Kahle
Sebastian Hein

Reports



[IIF]   [DBIS]   Updated: Fri Mar 3 16:48:24 MET 2000