1. A method of manufacturing a pulse oximeter configured to classify patient data comprising: generating statistics of interest representing sample data, wherein the sample data comprises oxygen saturation traces classified as either pathological or normal using human expertise, and the statistics of interest comprise at least one of linearity or infinite impulse response least squares regression of saturation variance of the sample data; composing a linear discriminator having a non-linear transform that accepts as input the statistics of interest; and programming a pulse oximeter to compute the linear discriminator using a kernel function, wherein the pulse oximeter is configured to use the linear discriminator to classify measured parameters of the patient data as indicating a normal or pathological condition and to communicate the classification to a user.