A Distributed Clustering Approach for Heterogeneous Environments Using Fuzzy Rough Set Theory

Vast majority of data mining algorithms have been designed to work on centralized data, unfortunately however, almost all of nowadays data sets are distributed both geographically and conceptually. Due to privacy and computation cost, centralizing distributed data sets before analyzing them is undoubtedly impractical. In this paper, we present a framework for clustering distributed data which takes into account privacy and computation cost. To do that, we remove uncertain instances and just send the label of the other instances to the central location. To remove the uncertain instances, we develop a new instance weighting method based on fuzzy and rough set theory. The achieved results on well-known data verify effectiveness of the proposed method compared to previous works.