Algorithm for finding association rules in distributed databases

In the emerging networked environment we are encountering situations in which databases residing at geographically distinct sites must collaborate with each other to analyze their data together. But due to large sizes of the datasets it is neither feasible nor safe to transport large datasets across the network to some common server. We need algorithms that can process the databases at their own locations by exchanging needed information among them and obtain the same results that would have been obtained if the databases were merged. In this paper we present an algorithm for mining association rules from distributed databases by exchanging only the needed summaries among them.