A Belief Rule Base Approach to Support Comparison of Digital Speech Signal Features for Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis

Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder. It affects the structures of the central and peripheral nervous system that control movement. One of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease is difficulty in speaking. Hence, analysis of speech signal of patients may provide valuable features for diagnosing. Previous works on diagnosis based on speech data have employed machine learning and deep learning techniques. However, these approaches do not address the various uncertainties in data. Belief rule based expert system (BRBES) is an approach that can reason under various forms of data uncertainty. Thus, the main objective of this research is to compare the potential of BRBES on various speech signal features of patients of parkinson’s disease. The research took into account various types of standard speech signal features such MFCCs, TQWTs etc. A BRBES was trained on a dataset of 188 patients of parkinson’s disease and 64 healthy candidates with 5-fold cross validation. It was optimized using an exploitive version of the nature inspired optimization algorithm called BRB-based adaptive differential evolution (BRBaDE). The optimized model performed better than explorative BRBaDE, genetic algorithm and MATLAB’s FMINCON optimization on most of these features. It was also found that for speech based diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease under uncertainty, the features such as Glottis Quotient, Jitter variants, MFCCs, RPDE, DFA and PPE are relatively more suitable.