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In this paper, we propose an innovative Federated Learning-inspired evolutionary framework. Its main novelty is that this is the first time that an Evolutionary Algorithm is employed on its own to directly perform Federated Learning activity. A further novelty resides in the fact that, differently from the other Federated Learning frameworks in the literature, ours can efficiently deal at the same time with two relevant issues in Machine Learning, i.e., data privacy and interpretability of the solutions. Our framework consists of a master/slave approach in which each slave contains local data, protecting sensible private data, and exploits an evolutionary algorithm to generate prediction models. The master shares through the slaves the locally learned models that emerge on each slave. Sharing these local models results in global models. Being that data privacy and interpretability are very significant in the medical domain, the algorithm is tested to forecast future glucose values for diabetic patients by exploiting a Grammatical Evolution algorithm. The effectiveness of this knowledge-sharing process is assessed experimentally by comparing the proposed framework with another where no exchange of local models occurs. The results show that the performance of the proposed approach is better and demonstrate the validity of its sharing process for the emergence of local models for personal diabetes management, usable as efficient global models. When further subjects not involved in the learning process are considered, the models discovered by our framework show higher generalization capability than those achieved without knowledge sharing: the improvement provided by knowledge sharing is equal to about 3.03% for precision, 1.56% for recall, 3.17% for F 1 , and 1.56% for accuracy. Moreover, statistical analysis reveals the statistical superiority of model exchange with respect to the case of no exchange taking place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetes is a heterogeneous group of diseases that share a common trait of elevated blood glucose levels. Insulin lowers this level by promoting glucose utilization, thus avoiding short- and long-term organ damage due to the elevated blood glucose level. A patient with diabetes uses an insulin pump to dose insulin. The pump uses a controller to compute and dose the correct amount of insulin to keep blood glucose levels in a safe range. Insulin-pump controller development is an ongoing process aiming at fully closed-loop control. Controllers entering the market must be evaluated for safety. We propose an evaluation method that exploits an FDA-approved diabetic patient simulator. The method evaluates a Cartesian product of individual insulin-pump parameters with a fine degree of granularity. As this is a computationally intensive task, the simulator executes on a distributed cluster. We identify safe and risky combinations of insulin-pump parameter settings by applying the binomial model and decision tree to this product. As a result, we obtain a tool for insulin-pump settings and controller safety assessment. In this paper, we demonstrate the tool with the Low-Glucose Suspend and OpenAPS controllers. For average ± standard deviation, LGS and OpenAPS exhibited 1.7 ± 0.6% and 3.2 ± 1.8% of local extrema (i.e., good insulin-pump settings) out of all the entire Cartesian products, respectively. A continuous region around the best-discovered settings (i.e., the global extremum) of the insulin-pump settings spread across 4.0 ± 1.1% and 4.1 ± 1.3% of the Cartesian products, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theory, called the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement, was proposed a few years ago to analyze rapid human movements, called the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movements, based on a delta-lognormal equation that globally describes the basic properties of the velocity profiles of an end-effector using seven parameters. This realistic model has been very useful for proposing original solutions to various pattern recognition problems (signature segmentation and verification, handwriting analysis and synthesis, etc.). Most of these applications rely on the use of an efficient algorithm to extract the delta-lognormal parameters from real data with the best possible fit. In this paper, we compare two such algorithms: a deterministic one, based on nonlinear regression, and a Breeder Genetic algorithm. The performance of these two algorithms and of their combinations are compared using the same artificial database, composed of analytical delta-lognormal profiles and their noisy versions (20 dB SNR). In the free-noise case, the analysis of the experimental results shows that the deterministic approach leads to better results than the evolutionary one, while under the extremely noisy conditions selected, the evolutionary approach seems to be less sensitive to noise, but is nevertheless less successful than the deterministic search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for automatic diagnoses is increasingly in the clinical field, being a useful support for the identification of several diseases. Nonetheless, the acceptance of AI-based diagnoses by the physicians is hampered by the black-box approach implemented by most performing systems, which do not clearly state the classification rules adopted. Methods: In this framework we propose a classification method based on a Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) approach, which allows for the automatic identification of the presence of the disease, and concurrently, provides the explicit classification model used by the system. Results: The proposed approach has been evaluated on the publicly available HandPD dataset, which contains handwriting samples drawn by Parkinson's disease patients and healthy controls. We show that our approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods, and more importantly, allows the physician to identify an explicit model relevant for the diagnosis based on the most informative subset of features. Conclusion: The obtained results suggest that the proposed approach is particularly appealing in that, starting from the explicit model, it allows the physicians to derive a set of guidelines for defining novel testing protocols and intervention strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]