Evaluating the COVID-19 Identification ResNet (CIdeR) on the INTERSPEECH COVID-19 From Audio Challenges

Several machine learning-based COVID-19 classifiers exploiting vocal biomarkers of COVID-19 has been proposed recently as digital mass testing methods. Although these classifiers have shown strong performances on the datasets on which they are trained, their methodological adaptation to new datasets with different modalities has not been explored. We report on cross-running the modified version of recent COVID-19 Identification ResNet (CIdeR) on the two Interspeech 2021 COVID-19 diagnosis from cough and speech audio challenges: ComParE and DiCOVA. CIdeR is an end-to-end deep learning neural network originally designed to classify whether an individual is COVID-19-positive or COVID-19-negative based on coughing and breathing audio recordings from a published crowdsourced dataset. In the current study, we demonstrate the potential of CIdeR at binary COVID-19 diagnosis from both the COVID-19 Cough and Speech Sub-Challenges of INTERSPEECH 2021, ComParE and DiCOVA. CIdeR achieves significant improvements over several baselines. We also present the results of the cross dataset experiments with CIdeR that show the limitations of using the current COVID-19 datasets jointly to build a collective COVID-19 classifier.