Reproducible Machine Learning-Based Voice Pathology Detection: Introducing the Pitch Difference Feature

We introduce a novel methodology for voice pathology detection using the publicly available Saarbrücken Voice Database and a robust feature set combining commonly used acoustic handcrafted features with two novel ones: pitch difference (relative variation in fundamental frequency) and NaN feature (failed fundamental frequency estimation).

We evaluate six machine learning (ML) algorithms-support vector machine, k-nearest neighbors, naive Bayes, decision tree, random forest, and AdaBoost-using grid search for feasible hyperparameters and 20 480 different feature subsets. Top 1000 classification models-feature subset combinations for each ML algorithm are validated with repeated stratified cross-validation. To address class imbalance, we apply k-means synthetic minority oversampling technique to augment the training data.

Our approach achieves 85.61%, 84.69%, and 85.22% unweighted average recall for females, males, and combined results, respectively. We intentionally omit accuracy as it is a highly biased metric for imbalanced data.

Our study demonstrates that by following the proposed methodology and feature engineering, there is a potential in detection of various voice pathologies using ML models applied to the simplest vocal task, a sustained utterance of the vowel /a:/. To enable easier use of our methodology and to support our claims, we provide a publicly available GitHub repository with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.13771573. Finally, we provide a REFORMS checklist to enhance readability, reproducibility, and justification of our approach.