Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machine for Voice Disorders Identification

The diagnosis of voice diseases through the invasive medical techniques is an efficient way but it is often uncomfortable for patients, therefore, the automatic speech recognition methods have attracted more and more interest recent years and have known a real success in the identification of voice impairments. In this context, this paper proposes a reliable algorithm for voice disorders identification based on two classification algorithms; the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and the Support Vector Machine (SVM). The feature extraction task is performed by the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and their first and second derivatives. In addition, the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is proposed as feature selection procedure in order to enhance the discriminative ability of the algorithm and minimize its complexity. The proposed voice disorders identification system is evaluated based on a widespread performance measures such as the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision and Area Under Curve (AUC). Keywords—Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR); Pathological voices; Artificial Neural Networks (ANN); Support Vector Machine (SVM); Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA); Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC)