2020 IEEE Region 10 Symposium (TENSYMP), 5-7 June 2020, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Classification of Parkinson’s Disease by Analyzing
Multiple Vocal Features Sets
Kazi Amit Hasan
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology
Rajshahi, Bangladesh
Email: kaziamithasan89@gmail.com
Abstract—Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a growing and chronic
neurodegenerative disease with a great amount of motor and non-
motor symptoms. In the initial stages, most of the PD patients
face difficulties in regular movements. Vocal disorders are one of
the common symptoms of them. Vocal disorder centric diagnosis
systems are one of the leading areas in recent PD detection
studies. In this paper, the dataset was taken from the UCI
Machine Learning repository and a feature extraction technique
was applied. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is used for
extracting the features as the dataset was full of features and the
topmost 50 features are selected according to ANOVA F-score.
Multiple machine learning classification methods were applied
and compared with other related existing works. Experimental
results show that the highest accuracy score of 0.91 was achieved
with the Random Forest Classifier method by feeding the selected
features. ANOVA as a feature extraction technique successfully
extracted the significant features that differentiate PD patients
from healthy individuals and also improve the classification
accuracy.
Index Terms—Parkinson’s Disease (PD), Feature Extraction,
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Classification
I. I NTRODUCTION
In recent years, health informatics systems perform a vital
role in identifying and monitoring different diseases. Parkin-
son’s disease (PD) is a rapidly growing neurodegenerative
disease with a great amount of motor and non-motor signs
[1]. The early death of dopamine generative neurons in the
substantia nigral region results in Parkinson’s disease (PD) [2].
As PD progresses, the amount of dopamine produced in the
brain diminishes gradually and the affected person becomes
unable to control his/her actions normally. People ranging
from 55-75 years are more at risk of affecting by PD. The
increasing risk expands the necessity for accurate PD diagnosis
and monitoring. In the US, there are about one million people
who got affected by Parkinson’s disease. Medications and
surgeries are possible treatments to cure their symptoms. Still,
no effective solution and therapy for Parkinson’s disease is
discovered [3].
PD detection methods focus on observing and estimating
the severity and austerity of the indications using numerous
types of devices. One of the most popular signs of PD is the
vocal difficulties, faced by 90% of PD victims in their earlier
stages of the disease [4]. This vocal problem-based systems
are in the uppermost positions on PD detection studies [5]. In
978-1-7281-7366-5/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
Md. Al Mehedi Hasan
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology
Rajshahi, Bangladesh
Email: mehedi ru@yahoo.com
these researches, numerous features were obtained by using
some speech signal processing methods and extracted features
were fed into different machine learning algorithms.
The analysis and investigation of PD are difficult in some
cases because of their overlapping symptoms. Only 75% of
the clinical investigation of PD is validated to be idiopathic
Parkinson’s Disease at autopsy due to the symptoms overlap
with other diseases [6]. An enormous amount of research
activities are performed in the PD classification. Classification
methods can escalate the accuracy and efficiency of the re-
ferred diagnosis system as well as can make the diagnosis time
more effective. In recent studies, TQWT features produced
better results than other vocal features. MFCC and TQWT
combined features also improved the classification accuracy
[4].
In this paper, different classifiers are used and applied to
recognize Parkinson’s disease. A feature selection technique,
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is used in this research and the
topmost 50 features are selected according to ANOVA F-value.
The extracted features were fed into different classification
algorithms and final prediction is generated from that. The
overall workflow is shown in Fig.2 in Methodology section.
Various classification methods are implemented for evaluating
the accuracy of the classifiers. As per the classification accu-
racy, random forest classifier yields 91% correct classification
rate.
II. DATASET
A. Dataset Description
The dataset used in this research was collected from the UCI
Machine Learning Repository [7]. This specific dataset was
also used in research [4], [8]. The dataset contains the data of
188 Parkinson disease affected patients, where 107 of them are
men and 81 of them are female. The age span of Parkinson’s
Disease patients is varied between 33 and 87 years. Along
with this, the control group contains 64 healthy individuals
where 23 of them are men and 41 of them are female. The
age varies between 41 to 82 years of the control healthy
individuals. This dataset was collected from the Department
of Neurology in Cerrahpasa Faculty of Medicine, Istanbul
University. The frequency response remained fixed to 44.1 kHz
of the microphone while gathering the data. After the doctor’s

Fig. 1: Correlation among the features before extracting them
from the dataset.
examination the repeated renewal of the vowel /a/ letter was
collected from each individual with three replicates. The
dataset contains various vocal features of different feature sets
like Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), Tunable
Q-Factor Wavelet Transform (TQWT), vocal fold along with
other baseline features [4].
B. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
There is a total number of 130 male and 122 female indi-
viduals data that are used in the dataset. This also represents
that the dataset is balanced from the gender perspective. As
this dataset has many features, the correlation heatmap will
describe it more clearly. The correlation heat map in Fig.1
clearly indicates the highly correlated features in the dataset.
This correlation problem is handled by ignoring the extremely
correlated features and selecting the best features by feature
selection method described in the Methodology section.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
A. Feature Extraction
The dataset has 754 attributes. The correlation among the
features is shown in Fig.1. As this dataset is full of features,
an univariate feature selection method is used in our research
to find out the most significant features out of these.
1) Analysis of Variance (ANOVA): The dataset used in this
research is full of features. For this, it is a tactful decision
to use a feature selection algorithm to find out the optimal
features. Feature selection methods also enhance prediction
quality. In this study, as a feature selection technique the
analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used and it is also used
in other different studies [9], [10]. ANOVA is a simple and
strong statistical method that examines the means of a couple
or more groups. It also determines how much the groups
are significantly different from each other. Several steps are
performed in ANOVA [10].
Data
Data Preprocessing
Feature Selection
Classification
Results
Fig. 2: Graphical representation of overall proposed PD clas-
sification system.
1) Calculating Sum of Squared Error (SSE)
2) Calculating Degree of Freedom (DF)
3) Calculating Mean Squares (MS)
4) Calculating F-value.
In this research, the prime 50 features were chosen and sorted
according to the best ANOVA F-value shown in Fig.3. The
scikit-learn [11] tool was used to determine the F-value as well
as the best 50 feature names. When the numerical features are
grouped by the target vector, the F-value tests that the means
for each group are significantly different from each other [12].
In Fig.3, the best 50 features are sorted in terms of their
F-values. With the ANOVA feature selection method it is
confirmed that most of the features are MFCCs and TQWT
features which also obtained in the study [4]. In our re-
search, the highest ANOVA F-value 142.51 was obtained by
mean MFCC 2nd coef feature among all the features. TQWT
features also have higher ANOVA F-values than the rest of the
features.
The correlation among the features is also handled using
ANOVA. The correlation heatmap in Fig.4 is clearly better
than Fig.1.
B. Classification
In this study, the entire dataset was divided into 20%
training and 80% testing sets. The best scores are shown in
Table I in Experiment and Results section.
1) Random Forest: Random Forest classification is also
used in previous PD classification studies [13], [14]. It is an
extended version of the bagging algorithm, fast and robust
to over-fitting that takes its origin from decision tree’s nature
[15].
 (a) AUC acheived with Decision (b) AUC acheived with Random
Tree classification method Forest classification method

Fig. 5: AUC curves of Decision Tree and Random Forest

classification method.

It is also used in the study [19]. Conditional probability is

used in naive Bayes classifier to get the results [20].
6) Support Vector Machine (SVM): SVM which is also
known as decision boundary function by finding a hyperplane.
SVM is also used in the study of PD classification [21]. In
this research, Linear and Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernels
are applied as classification methods.
Fig. 3: Top 50 features with their ANOVA F-value. IV. E XPERIMENT AND R ESULTS
A. Evaluation Metrics
In this study, five statistical measures accuracy, precision,
recall, f-1 score and AUC curve were used as evaluation
metrics to estimate the performance and efficiency of the
classifiers [22].
TP + TN
Accuracy = (1)
TP + FP + FN + TN
TP
(a) Correlation heat-map of first 10 (b) Correlation heat-map of second P recision = (2)
features after feature extraction. 10 features after feature extraction. TP + FP
TP
Fig. 4: Correlation among the features after feature extraction Recall = (3)
in the dataset. TP + FN
2 ∗ (Recall ∗ P recision)
F 1 Score = (4)
(Recall + P recision)
2) k-Nearest Neighbour: kNN is a simple, powerful su-
where, TP, TN, FP, FN means True Positives, True Negative,
pervised learning algorithm used in previous PD classification
False Positives and False Negatives values respectively [23].
studies [16]. Different values of k in kNN classifier are applied
AUC curves were also used in this research to examine how
and compared with one another. Then the impacts are analyzed
well the probabilities from the positive classes are separated
and pointed out the best value. In our research, the best
from the negative classes. The AUC curve is the degree of
accuracy score was achieved with k=5.
True Positive and False Positive rate which maps the sensitivity
3) Decision Tree: Decision tree based classification is also against 1 - specificity that signifies the overall effectiveness of
used in the studies [17]. It builds classification or regression the model [17].
models in the type of tree structure. In this study, the best
AUC score is achieved with the decision tree. B. Results
4) Logistic Regression (LR): Logistic Regression based The comparison between this research work and other re-
classification is used in different PD classification studies [18]. search work [4] is shown in the Table I. Different classification
LR also used in many classification problems because of being methods random forest, k-nearest neighbour, decision tree,
binary in nature. gradient boosting, logistic regression, naive bayes and support
5) Naive Bayes: Naive Bayes is a supervised learning vector machine are used in this research. The best accuracy
classifier that works on the Bayesian Probabilistic theorem. score is 0.91 achieved with Random Forest classification
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