Mining local data sources for learning global cluster models

Distributed data mining has been a topic getting more important nowadays as there are many cases where physically sharing of data is prohibited, e.g., due to huge data volume or data privacy. In this paper, we are interested in learning a global cluster model by exploring data in distributed sources. A methodology based on periodic model exchange and merge is proposed and applied to hyperlinked Web pages analysis. In addition, we have tested a number of variations of the basic idea, including putting more emphasis on the privacy concern and testing the effect of having different numbers of distributed sources. Experimental results show that the proposed distributed learning scheme is effective with accuracy close to the case with all the data physically shared for the learning.