An automated method and system are provided for receiving an input of flow cytometry data and analyzing the data using one or more support vector machines to generate an output in which the flow cytometry data is classified into two or more categories. The one or more support vector machines utilizes a kernel that captures distributional data within the input data. Such a distributional kernel is constructed by using a distance function (divergence) between two distributions. In the preferred embodiment, a kernel based upon the Bhattacharya affinity is used. The distributional kernel is applied to classification of flow cytometry data obtained from patients suspected having myelodysplastic syndrome.