Incremental learning and granular computing from evolving data streams: An application to speech-based bipolar disorder diagnosis

We apply an evolving granular-computing modeling approach, called evolving Optimal Granular System (eOGS), to bipolar mood disorder (BD) diagnosis based on speech data streams. The eOGS online learning algorithm reveals information granules in the flow and design the structure and parameters of a granular rule-based model with a certain degree of interpretability based on acoustic attributes obtained from phone calls made over 7 months to the Psychiatry department of a hospital. A multi-objective programming problem that trades-off information specificity, model compactness, and numerical and granular error indices is presented. Spectral and prosodic attributes are ranked and selected based on a hybrid Pearson-Spearman correlation coefficient. Low attribute-class correlation, ranging from 0.03 to 0.07, is observed, as well as high class overlap, which is typical in the psychiatric field. eOGS models for BD recognition overcome alternative computational-intelligence models, namely, Dynamic Evolving Neural-Fuzzy Inference System (DENFIS) and Fuzzy-set-Based evolving Modeling (FBeM-Gauss), by a small margin in both best and average cases; followed by eXtended Takagi-Sugeno (xTS) and evolving Takagi Sugeno (eTS) types of models. The proposed eOGS model using only 8 of the original acoustic attributes, and about 15 ‘If-Then’ inference rules, has exhibited the best root mean square error, 0.1361, and 91.8% accuracy in sharp BD class estimates. Granules associated to linguistic labels and a granular input-output map offer human understandability with relation to the inherent process of generating class estimates. Linguistically readable eOGS rules may assist physicians in explaining symptoms and making a diagnosis.