Title: Selection of vocal features for Parkinson's Disease diagnosis

Authors: Olcay Kursun; Ergun Gumus; Ahmet Sertbas; Oleg V. Favorov

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul University, Avcilar, Istanbul, 34320, Turkey ' Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul University, Avcilar, Istanbul, 34320, Turkey ' Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul University, Avcilar, Istanbul, 34320, Turkey ' Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

Abstract: Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative motor system disorder, which also causes vocal impairments for most of its patients. A number of recent exploratory studies have evaluated the feasibility of detecting voice disorders by applying data mining tools to acoustic features extracted from speech recordings of patients. Selection of a minimal yet descriptive set of features is crucial for improving the classifier generalisation capability and interpretability of the classification model as well as for reducing the burden of data preprocessing. We propose a hybrid of feature selection and cross-validation procedures to lower the bias in the assessment of classifier accuracy.

Keywords: acoustic measurements; telemedicine; bootstrapping; leave-one-out cross-validation; TSS; true skill score; sequential backward feature selection; SVM; support vector machines; Parkinson's Disease; vocal features; vocal impairments; data mining; feature extraction; classification models; data preprocessing; classifier accuracy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDMB.2012.048196

International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, 2012 Vol.6 No.2, pp.144 - 161

Published online: 17 Dec 2014 *

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