Stacked Deep Dense Neural Network Model to Predict Alzheimer’s Dementia Using Audio Transcript Data

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is caused by cortical degeneration leading to memory loss and dementia. A possible criterion for the early identification of Alzheimer’s dementia is to identify the difference between positive and negative linguistic and cognitive abilities of the patients. This study involves the use of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), designed a hybrid model with CNN & Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (Bidirectional LSTM), and proposed a Stacked Deep Dense Neural Network (SDDNN) model for text classification and prediction of Alzheimer’s dementia. These models were trained end-to-end using DementiaBank clinical transcript dataset. The transcripts consisted of recorded interviews of Alzheimer’s patients with clinical experts. The models were investigated under two settings: Randomly initialized and Glove embedding. Further, hyperparameter optimization was accomplished using GridSearch, which yielded optimal parameters for the design of suitable learning models for most accurate predictions. Other parameters were computed and compared based on AUC, accuracy, specificity, precision, F1 score, and recall. To ensure performance generalization, the classification accuracy was tested using 10-fold cross-validation approach. The performance and classification accuracy of the proposed model was significantly improved to 93.31% when applied with Glove embedding and hyperparameter tuning. This research work will considerably help the clinical experts in early detection and diagnosis of AD.