Adaptive Metadata-Guided Supervised Contrastive Learning for Domain Adaptation on Respiratory Sound Classification

Despite considerable advancements in deep learning, optimizing respiratory sound classification (RSC) models remains challenging. This is partly due to the bias from inconsistent respiratory sound recording processes and imbalanced representation of demographics, which leads to poor performance when a model trained with the dataset is applied to real-world use cases. RSC datasets usually include various metadata attributes describing certain aspects of the data, such as environmental and demographic factors. To address the issues caused by bias, we take advantage of the metadata provided by RSC datasets and explore approaches for metadata-guided domain adaptation. We thoroughly evaluate the effect of various metadata attributes and their combinations on a simple metadata-guided approach, but also introduce a more advanced method that adaptively rescales the suitable metadata combinations to improve domain adaptation during training. The findings indicate a robust reduction in domain dependency and improvement in detection accuracy on both ICBHI and our own dataset. Specifically, the implementation of our proposed methods led to an improved score of 84.97%, which signifies a substantial enhancement of 7.37% compared to the baseline model.