ByoVoz Automatic Voice Condition Analysis System for the 2018 FEMH Challenge

This paper presents the methods and results used by the ByoVoz team for the design of an automatic voice condition analysis system, which was submitted to the 2018 Far East Memorial Hospital voice data challenge. The proposed methodology is based on a cascading scheme that firstly discriminates between pathological and normophonic voices, and then identifies the type of disorder. By using diverse feature selection techniques, a subset of complexity, spectral/cepstral and perturbation characteristics were identified for the proposed tasks. Then, several generative classification methodologies based on Gaussian Mixture Models and Gradient Boosting were employed to provide decisions about the input voices in the binary classification, and using one-vs-one classification systems based on Random Forests for the categorization according to the type of disorder. By using a 4-folds cross-validation approach on the training partition a sensitivity=0.93 and specificity=0.74 was obtained. Similarly, an unweighted average recall of 0.63 and an accuracy of 66% was obtained for the identification task. Using the scoring metric proposed in the challenge the final resulting score is of 0.77. When the testing partition was considered, a sensitivity of 0.92, specificity of 0.54, unweighted average recall of 0.61 and a score of 0.72 were obtained. This was the fifth best result in the competition.