Applying data mining techniques to medical time series: an empirical case study in electroencephalography and stabilometry

Privacy Preserving Feature Selection for Vertically Distributed Medical Data based on Genetic Algorithms and Naïve Bayes

Machine learning is a powerful tool to mine useful knowledge from vast databases. Many establishments in the medical area such as hospitals, laboratories want to join their efforts with the ambition to extract models that are more accurate. However, this approach faces problems. Due to the laws protecting patient privacy or other similar concerns, parties are reluctant to share their data. In vast amounts of data, which are useful and pertinent in constructing accurate data mining models? In this article, the researchers deal with these challenges for vertically distributed medical data. They propose an original secure wrapper solution to perform feature selection based on genetic algorithms and distributed Naïve Bayes. Contrary to the previous solutions, the original data is not perturbed. Therefore, the data utility and performance are preserved. They prove that the proposed solution selects relevant attributes to increase performance, preserving patient privacy.

Genomic big data hitting the storage bottleneck

During the last decades, there is a vast data explosion in bioinformatics. Big data centres are trying to face this data crisis, reaching high storage capacity levels. Although several scientific giants examine how to handle the enormous pile of information in their cupboards, the problem remains unsolved. On a daily basis, there is a massive quantity of permanent loss of extensive information due to infrastructure and storage space problems. The motivation for sequencing has fallen behind. Sometimes, the time that is spent to solve storage space problems is longer than the one dedicated to collect and analyse data. To bring sequencing to the foreground, scientists have to slide over such obstacles and find alternative ways to approach the issue of data volume. Scientific community experiences the data crisis era, where, out of the box solutions may ease the typical research workflow, until technological development meets the needs of Bioinformatics.