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Voice Pathology Classification Using Machine Learning

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 Voice Pathology Classification Using Machine
Learning
Hussein M. A. Mohammed Asli Nur Omeroglu
Department of Electrical & Electronic Department of Electrical & Electronic
Engineering Ataturk University Engineering Ataturk University
Erzurum,Turkey Erzurum,Turkey
halameri080@gmail.com asli.omeroglu@atauni.edu.tr
Emin Argun Oral
Department of Electrical & Electronic
Engineering Ataturk University Erzurum,Turkey
eminoral@atauni.edu.tr
Abstract — In this study, the diagnosis of voice diseases
affecting the sound quality of many people during their life
has been examined. Systems developed for the automatic
classification of healthy and pathological sounds are of great
interest in early detection of voice disorders. The main
purpose of this study is to investigate and compare the
performance of these techniques using various machine
learning techniques for voice pathology. All analyzes are
performed using the Saarbruecken Voice Database. Detection
of voice pathology are evaluated in terms of accuracy,
sensitivity and specificity. Depending on the characteristics
evaluated, the best accuracy is determined as 85.91% by using
SVM algorithm.
Keywords — Voice Disorder; Machine Learning.
[1] INTRODUCTION
Sound is the most important communication tool
among human beings. Vocal communication is a basic skill
that people need it to express their feelings for daily social
interactions and earn it during their life span. Professionals
such as singers, actors, auctioneers, lawyers, and teachers
who use their voices at a higher level than normal levels
are at risk of pathological voice problems. Also people who
have voice disturbances due to the voice misuse,
neurological disorders, drug use and unhealthy social
habits may encounter many problems when
communicating with people and lead to many social and
personal complications. Vocal cord vibration is affected in
different ways depending on the type and location of the
disease in the vocal fold. Voice pathologies resulting from
changes in sound quality, pitch and volume can be
clinically determined by performing several procedures,
such as acoustic analysis which consists of estimation of
appropriate parameters extracted from an audio signal to
assess possible changes in the audio path in accordance
with the rules of the SIFEL protocol [2] (Società Italiana di
Figure.1. Illustration of voice pathology detection system
Foniatria e Logopedia) prepared by Italian Logopedic and
354
Merve Polat
Department of Electrical & Electronic
Engineering Ataturk University
Erzurum,Turkey
merve.polat12@ogr.atauni.edu.tr
Ibrahim Yucel Ozbek
Department of Electrical & Electronic
Engineering Ataturk University
Erzurum,Turkey
iozbek@atauni.edu.tr
Phoniatrics Association. Acoustic parameters are then used
to evaluate sound health status. The accuracy of these
parameters in detecting voice disturbances plays an
important role in the detection of voice disturbances. The
accuracy of the acoustic parameters is related to the
algorithms used to estimate them. There has been an
interest recently in machine learning techniques in the field
of sound pathology in order to increase the accuracy of
these parameters. In this study, application of feature
selection techniques and machine learning algorithms with
the ability to distinguish the patient and healthy sounds
with the best accuracy is investigated. In detail, we evaluate
the pathology using different features obtained from voice
signals in addition to patients’ age and gender information.
The performance of the used machine learning methods is
evaluated in terms of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity.
Details of this study as follows. Section II presents studies
on detection of sound diseases by using machine learning
techniques available in literature. In Section III, the data
set, features and machine learning algorithms used for the
classification in experimental stage are introduced. The
results are discussed in Chapter V, while our results are
given in Section IV.
[2] RELATED WORK
Sound pathology in the sense of data science is a multi-
class classification problem depending on the audio signal
from individuals. In detecting sound pathology, several
machine classifiers are usually applied. In recent years,
several approaches have been developed to improve
performance in terms of accuracy in separating healthy and
pathological sounds. These approaches focus on
identifying parameters for measuring sound quality and
new techniques that can detect voice disorders. A brief
summary of some recent studies on our research topic is as
follows; Ghulam Muhammad et al. [4] are proposed a smart
healthcare framework using edge computing. With the
proposed system they achieved 98.5 percent accuracy
using the part of Saarbrucken Voice Disorder (SVD)
database. Daria [5] makes an effort on creation of efficient
and accurate system for automatic detection of normal and
three different voice pathologies by using SVD database.
 The decision system based on neural networks. Laura
Verde et al. [6] are focused on investigation and
comparision of the performance of several machine
learning techniques useful for voice pathology detection.
All analyses are performed on a dataset of voices selected
from the SVD database. A novel system for pathological
voice detection using Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN) is presented [7, 8]. In this system parts of SVD
database is used. Kebin Wu et al. [9] are proposed a novel
model JOLL4R (JOint Learning based on Label Relaxed
low-Rank Ridge Regression) to fuse audios for voice based
disease detection. In these studies, NN (Neural Network)
and SVM (Support Vector Machine) are used by
combining American and German databases MEEI and
SVD to detect voice disorders [9, 10]. Pavol Harar et al.
described a preliminary investigation of Voice Pathology
Detection using Deep Neural Networks (DNN) [12].
[3] METHOD
A. Database
In our study, we used the publicly available
Saarbruecken Voice Database (SVD) database recorded by
the Phonetic Institute of the University of Saarland in
Germany. SVD is composed of healthy and pathological
individuals’ voice records. There are 1354 (627 male and
727 female) pathological, suffering from 71 different
diseases, and 687 (259 male and 428 female) healthy voice
recordings. This database consists of vowels /a/, /i/, /u/ and
“Guten Morgen, wie geht es Ihnen?” (Good morning, how
are you?) sentences in German.
In the study, we have used only the /a/ vowel and all the
available records in the SVD database for the classification
of healthy and pathological sounds. Each sample of the data
used in this study consists of the voice ID (a number to
define the record), age, gender and class information as
healthy or pathological. The experiments are evaluated
using the whole database and a balanced database,
composed of 685 male and 685 female subjects.
Distribution details of healthy and pathological samples of
balanced database in terms of their age and gender are
given in Table.1.
[1] Table.1 Balanced Dataset used in study
[2] [3] Healthy [4] Pathological
[5] Age [6] Female [7] Male [8] Female [9] Male
[10] 17- [11] 359 [12] 138 [13] 58 [14] 23
29
[15] 30- [16] 27 [17] 62 [18] 94 [19] 24
39
[20] 40- [21] 15 [22] 37 [23] 85 [24] 43
49
[25] 50- [26] 13 [27] 9 [28] 87 [29] 74
59
[30] 60+ [31] 14 [32] 11 [33] 104 [34] 93
[35] Total [36] 685 [37] 685
B. Features
Feature extraction, in general, is an important step in
improving the success of a classification algorithm as it
helps better analyze any given data. Features, commonly
used in voice classification studies for machine learning
techniques, are also utilized in the current study. For that
355
purpose, raw features are first obtained in terms of MFCC,
statistical features such as kurtosis, swekness, etc., all
calculated over vowel /a/. Then processed features are
formed based on these raw features. They are as follows:
• Age: age of each subject
• Gender: gender of each subject
• Mean and standart variations of raw features
calculated over epochs of each record
Class of each record as healthy or pathological are used
as labels during experiments.
C. Classifiers
Different machine learning algorithms are preferred to
make a comprehensive comparison of the features obtained
from the audio files. These techniques used are given
below.
Support Vector Machine (SVM): Support Vector
Machines are mainly used to linearly separate data from
different classes. It is important to determine an optimal
decision plane that is as far as possible from two classes.
Training of support vector machines requires a solution in
the form of a quadratic optimization problem. Sequential
Minimal Optimization (SMO) technique can also be used
for solution [14]. Kernels is utilized to convert a non-
linearly separable problem to a linearly-separable form.
Logistic Model Tree (LMT): It is a classification model
that combines logistic regression and decision tree [15].
Unlike ordinary decision trees, the logistic model leaves
have a logistic regression model.
Decision Tree (DT): In this algorithm, the learned function
is represented by a decision tree. A structure used to divide
a data set into smaller clusters by applying a set of decision
rules. To classify the data, J48, an application of the C4.5
tree classifier [16], was used.
K-Nearest Neighbord (KNN): In this algorithm, the
similarity of a new data, to be classified, is compared to
each example in the data in terms of distance between
them. They are sorted, and first k closest is used for a
decision. In this study, we used value of 50 for k and
Euclidean distance function to classify the data.
D. Feature Selection
Among the various features, some of them are more
valuable for voice pathology classification. Feature
selection algorithms form a subset of the best features to
increase the algorithm speed and accuracy by eliminating
irrelevant features and reducing the size of feature set.
There are many algorithms available for feature
selection. In this work, gradient boosting machine is used
for that purpose. This algorithm trains very precise
classifiers quickly while choosing high quality features
[13]. Ten most valuable features obtained by feature
selection algorithm are shown in Figure.2.
 DT 81.47 86.20 72.20
KNN 74.41 80.30 62.90
BALANCED DATA
Accuracy (%) Sensitivity (%) Specificity
(%)
SVM 85.91 88.47 83.36
LMT 84.96 82.90 87.00
DT 78.24 78.50 78.00
KNN 78.75 69.90 87.60

Table.3. Classification Results with Feature selection

Figure.2. Most valuable features obtained SELECTED FEATURES
ALL DATA
[4] RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Accuracy (%) Sensitivity Specificity
A. Performance Criteria (%) (%)
The performance of the proposed method is evaluated SVM 83.57 84.70 81.40
with K-fold cross-validation by which K-1 of folds is used LMT 84.90 89.70 75.40
as training set while the remaining one is used as test set. DT 83.62 88.50 74.10
The performance results are averaged over all folds. In our KNN 77.50 82.70 67.20
experiments, K was chosen as ten. In addition to accuracy, BALANCED DATA
sensitivity and specificity measurements are also used to Accuracy (%) Sensitivity Specificity
evaluate the performance of selected classification (%) (%)
techniques. SVM 85.03 81.80 88.30
Accuracy, percentage of correctly classified LMT 84.30 81.30 87.30
pathological and healthy voices, is defined in Eq.1 as DT 82.99 86.60 79.40
follows: KNN 83.64 77.80 89.50
(𝑇𝑃 + 𝑇𝑁) ()
𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦 =
(𝑇𝑃 + 𝑇𝑁 + 𝐹𝑃 + 𝐹𝑁)
B. Classification Results
Sensitivity, representing the positive results of the test, and In this work four set of experiments are conducted
Specificity, representing the negative results, are defined in using two different datasets, namely all and balanced, and
Eq.2 and Eq.3, respectively. two different feature sets, namely all and selected, as
explained in Section III. Table 2 represents test results of
all four classifiers when all features are extracted using all
𝑇𝑃 () data as well as balanced data. Same results are obtained and
𝑆𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑦 =
(𝑇𝑃 + 𝐹𝑁) presented in Table 3 when ten most valuable features,
𝑇𝑁 ()
suggested by gradient boosting machine, are considered
𝑆𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑡𝑦 = only. When the balanced dataset is used, the best accuracy
(𝑇𝑁 + 𝐹𝑃)
of 85.91% in voice pathology detection is obtained by
Here TP, TN, FP and FN are defined as follows. using SVM classifier. This is higher than the best result
reported in the literature as shown in Table 4. When we
• True Positive (TP): the algorithm recognizes that the
voice sample is pathological, and it is actually pathological. consider all dataset, Logistic Model Tree gives best
accuracy, sensitivity results while that of specificity is
• True Negative (TN): the algorithm recognizes that the obtained with SVM if gradient boosting machine selected
voice sample is healthy, and it is actually healthy. features are utilized by classifiers. Also, when the feature
• False Positive (FP): the voice sample is healthy but the selection is utilized the accuracy, sensitivity and specificity
algorithm recognizes it as pathological; increased in LMT, DT and KNN while only specificity
increased in SVM. On the other hand, when the feature
• False Negative (FN): the voice sample is pathological but selection is utilized with balanced dataset, the accuracy,
the algorithm recognizes it as healthy sensitivity and specificity are all increased in DT and KNN
Table 2. Classification Results without Feature selection methods, whereas only specificity increased in SVM and
ALL FEATURES LMT methods.
ALL DATA
Accuracy (%) Sensitivity (%) Specificity
(%)
SVM 83.82 81.66 84.90
LMT 83.52 88.00 74.80

356
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