Autoencoder-XGBoost Classifier (AeXGB) for Predicting Severity Level of Parkinson's Disease from Spontaneous Speech

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the cause of the gradual decline of nerve cells that control movement disorder disease, which is most common among the elderly in the US after Alzheimer's disease. There are several studies on detecting Parkinson's disease from speech using machine learning techniques; however, most of them focus on classifying healthy patients (HC) against Parkinson's disease (PD). This paper focuses on developing a screening system that could detect healthy (HC) vs. mild Parkinson's (MP) vs. severe Parkinson's (SP) from spontaneous speech. Four acoustic feature sets were compared for the screening system. Our proposed AeXGB was also compared with six different classifying approaches. The result has shown that extracting the phonation features and using AeXGB could achieve an accuracy of 92% for classifying HC vs. MP vs. SP, which outperforms the traditional machine learning approach for three class classifications of Parkinson's severity level from spontaneous speech.