Random Forest Algorithm Based on Speech for Early Identification of Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

To investigate the effectiveness of identifying patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) from speech signals, various acoustic parameters including prosodic and segmental features are extracted from speech and then the random forest classification (RF) algorithm based on these acoustic parameters is applied to diagnose early-stage PD patients. To validate the proposed method of RF algorithm in early-stage PD identification, this study compares the accuracy rate of RF with that of neurologists’ judgments based on auditory test outcomes, and the results clearly show the superiority of the proposed method over its rival. Random forest algorithm based on speech can improve the accuracy of patients’ identification, which provides an efficient auxiliary method in the early diagnosis of PD patients.