The described systems and methods can be used to estimate the global distributed kernel density without prior information of data using a gossip based method. In the gossip based method, a node in a distributed network periodically selects and exchanges kernels with a random node in the network. After exchanging, both the initiating and the target node use the received kernels to update their local estimates. In addition, a data reduction method can be used to optimize the size of the kernel set at each node.