With the existence of many large transaction databases, the huge amounts of data, the high scalability of distributed systems, and the easy partition and distribution of a centralized database, it is important to inuestzgate eficient methods for distributed mining of association rules. This study discloses some interesting relationships between locally large and globally large itemsets and proposes an interesting distributed association rule mining algorithm, FDM (Fast Distributed Mining of

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... ciation rules), which generates a small number of candidate sets and substantially reduces the number of messages to be passed at mining association rules. Our performance study shows that FDM has a superior performance over the direct application of a typical sequential algorithm. Further performance enhancement leads to a few variations of the algorithm. 0-8186-7475-X/96 $5.00 0 1996 IEEE