To efficiently find global patterns from a multi-database, information in each local database must first be mined and summarized at the local level. Then only the summarized information is forwarded to the global mining process. However, conventional sequential pattern mining methods based on support cannot summarize the local information and is ineffective for global pattern mining from multiple data sources. In this paper, we present an alternative local mining approach for finding sequential patterns in the local databases of a multi-database. We propose the theme of approximate sequential pattern mining roughly defined as identifying patterns approximately shared by many sequences. Approximate sequential patterns can effectively summerize and represent the local databases by identifying the underlying trends in the data. We present a novel algorithm, ApproxMAP, to mine approximate sequential patterns, called consensus patterns, from large sequence databases in two steps. First, se...