Harnessing Voice Analysis and Machine Learning for Early Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease: A Comparative Study Across Three Datasets

Abstract

Objective This study evaluates the efficacy of voice analysis combined with machine learning (ML) techniques in enabling the diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease (PD). Methods Voice data, phonation of the vowel 'a', from three distinct datasets (two from the UCI ML Repository and one from figshare) for 432 participants (278 PD patients) were analyzed. We employed four ML models - Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting (GB), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) - alongside two ensemble methods (soft voting classifier - EVC and stacking method - ESM). The models underwent 50 iterations of evaluation, involving various data splits and 10-fold cross-validation. Comparative analysis was done using one-way ANOVA followed by Bonferroni post hoc corrections. Results The ESM, SVM, and GB models emerged as the top performers, demonstrating superior performance across metrics, including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1 score, and ROC AUC. Despite data heterogeneity and variable selection limitations, the models showed high values for all metrics. Conclusion Machine learning integration with voice analysis, mainly through ESM, SVM, and GB, is promising for early PD diagnosis. Using multi-source data and a large sample size enhances our findings' validity, reliability, and generalizability.