Unsupervised clustering of MDS data using federated learning

In this master thesis we developed a model for unsupervised clustering on a data set of biomedical data. This data has been collected by GenoMed4All consortium from patients affected by Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS), that is an haematological disease. The main focus is put on the genetic mutations collected that are used as features of the patients in order to cluster them. Clustering approaches have been used in several studies concerning haematological diseases such MDS. A neural network-based model was used to solve the task. The results of the clustering have been compared with labels from a "gold standard'' technique, i.e. hierarchical Dirichlet processes (HDP). Our model was designed to be also implemented in the context of federated learning (FL). This innovative technique is able to achieve machine learning objective without the necessity of collecting all the data in one single center, allowing strict privacy policies to be respected. Federated learning was used because of its properties, and because of the sensitivity of data. Several recent studies regarding clinical problems addressed with machine learning endorse the development of federated learning settings in such context, because its privacy preserving properties could represent a cornerstone for applying machine learning techniques to medical data. In this work will be then discussed the clustering performance of the model, and also its generative capabilities.