Dysphonic Voice Pattern Analysis of Patients in Parkinson’s Disease Using Minimum Interclass Probability Risk Feature Selection and Bagging Ensemble Learning Methods

Analysis of quantified voice patterns is useful in the detection and assessment of dysphonia and related phonation disorders. In this paper, we first study the linear correlations between 22 voice parameters of fundamental frequency variability, amplitude variations, and nonlinear measures. The highly correlated vocal parameters are combined by using the linear discriminant analysis method. Based on the probability density functions estimated by the Parzen-window technique, we propose an interclass probability risk (ICPR) method to select the vocal parameters with small ICPR values as dominant features and compare with the modified Kullback-Leibler divergence (MKLD) feature selection approach. The experimental results show that the generalized logistic regression analysis (GLRA), support vector machine (SVM), and Bagging ensemble algorithm input with the ICPR features can provide better classification results than the same classifiers with the MKLD selected features. The SVM is much better at distinguishing normal vocal patterns with a specificity of 0.8542. Among the three classification methods, the Bagging ensemble algorithm with ICPR features can identify 90.77% vocal patterns, with the highest sensitivity of 0.9796 and largest area value of 0.9558 under the receiver operating characteristic curve. The classification results demonstrate the effectiveness of our feature selection and pattern analysis methods for dysphonic voice detection and measurement.