Optimal Feature Selection and Comparison for Automatic Detection of Parkinson's Disease Using Speech Signal

In recent years, researchers have tried hardly to diagnose Parkinson's disease through finding its relation with the patient's speech signal. Also, many studies have been performed on determining the intensity of the disease and its relation with vocal impairment measures. In this paper, we aim to assess and compare the ability of extracting different feature sets from speech signal in order to Parkinson's disease diagnosis. Therefore, 132 features were used to measure vocal impairments from the voice signal of individuals vocalizing phoneme /a/. Then, we used RELIEF feature selection method and applied it to Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to choose the best feature of each class. A comparison was made between different feature sets, and finally discrimination percent 95.93 was reached to separate patients from the healthy ones using the combination of selected features. Results obtained from this research can be a very important step toward diagnosing Parkinson's disease non-invasively.