Abstract Feature selection is an efficient dimensionality reduction technique for artificial intelligence and machine learning. Many feature selection methods learn the data structure to select the most discriminative features for distinguishing different classes. However, the data is sometimes distributed in multiple parties and sharing the original data is difficult due to the privacy requirement. As a result, the data in one party may be lack of useful information to learn the most discriminative features. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed method which allows collaborative feature selection for multiple parties without revealing their original data. In the proposed method, each party finds the intermediate representations from the original data, and shares the intermediate representations for collaborative feature selection. Based on the shared intermediate representations, the original data from multiple parties are transformed to the same low dimensional space. The feature ranking of the original data is learned by imposing row sparsity on the transformation matrix simultaneously. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method