Distributed data mining and agents

Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer an architecture for distributed problem solving. Distributed data mining (DDM) algorithms focus on one class of such distributed problem solving tasks-analysis and modeling of distributed data. This paper offers a perspective on DDM algorithms in the context of multi-agents systems. It discusses broadly the connection between DDM and MAS. It provides a high-level survey of DDM, then focuses on distributed clustering algorithms and some potential applications in multi-agent-based problem solving scenarios. It reviews algorithms for distributed clustering, including privacy-preserving ones. It describes challenges for clustering in sensor-network environments, potential shortcomings of the current algorithms, and future work accordingly. It also discusses confidentiality (privacy preservation) and presents a new algorithm for privacy-preserving density-based clustering. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.