Redundancy analysis of behavioral coding for couples therapy and improved estimation of behavior from noisy annotations

Assessment and quantification of behavior is an important research objective in the recently developed field of behavioral signal processing. This paper focuses on the estimation of behavior from noisy human assessment. It aims to address the redundancy of behavioral descriptors for couples therapy by introducing a lower-dimensional representation of the behavioral space. We present an improved method for estimating the ground truth of behavioral ratings from assessment by multiple experts or annotators. The results show improved estimation performance using the proposed method and provide an insightful analysis of reconstruction error and decorrelation of annotator bias in the reduced behavioral space.