  Distributed, online data mining systems have emerged as a result of
applications requiring analysis of large amounts of correlated and
high-dimensional data produced by multiple distributed data sources. We propose
a distributed online data classification framework where data is gathered by
distributed data sources and processed by a heterogeneous set of distributed
learners which learn online, at run-time, how to classify the different data
streams either by using their locally available classification functions or by
helping each other by classifying each other's data. Importantly, since the
data is gathered at different locations, sending the data to another learner to
process incurs additional costs such as delays, and hence this will be only
beneficial if the benefits obtained from a better classification will exceed
the costs. We model the problem of joint classification by the distributed and
heterogeneous learners from multiple data sources as a distributed contextual
bandit problem where each data is characterized by a specific context. We
develop a distributed online learning algorithm for which we can prove
sublinear regret. Compared to prior work in distributed online data mining, our
work is the first to provide analytic regret results characterizing the
performance of the proposed algorithm.
