Diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease based on voice signals using SHAP and hard voting ensemble method

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common progressive neurological condition after Alzheimer’s. The significant number of individuals afflicted with this illness makes it essential to develop a method to diagnose the conditions in their early phases. PD is typically identified from motor symptoms or via other Neuroimaging techniques. Expensive, time-consuming, and unavailable to the general public, these methods are not very accurate. Another issue to be addressed is the black-box nature of machine learning methods that needs interpretation. These issues encourage us to develop a novel technique using Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) and Hard Voting Ensemble Method based on voice signals to diagnose PD more accurately. Another purpose of this study is to interpret the output of the model and determine the most important features in diagnosing PD. The present article uses Pearson Correlation Coefficients to understand the relationship between input features and the output. Input features with high correlation are selected and then classified by the Extreme Gradient Boosting, Light Gradient Boosting Machine, Gradient Boosting, and Bagging. Moreover, the weights in Hard Voting Ensemble Method are determined based on the performance of the mentioned classifiers. At the final stage, it uses SHAP to determine the most important features in PD diagnosis. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using ‘Parkinson Dataset with Replicated Acoustic Features’ from the UCI machine learning repository. It has achieved an accuracy of 85.42%. The findings demonstrate that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art approaches and can assist physicians in diagnosing Parkinson’s cases.

Keywords:

• Gradient boosting
• LightGBM
• Parkinson’s disease
• SHAP
• XGBoost

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Saeed Chehreh Chelgani (from the Lulea University of Technology) and Mohammad Ezzoddin (from the University of Tehran), who voluntarily helped us with this paper. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

CRediT authorship contribution

Paria Ghaheri: Conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing, visualization. Hamid Nasiri: Conceptualization, methodology, validation, formal analysis, investigation, writing – review & editing, supervision. Ahmadreza Shateri: Conceptualization, methodology, software, formal analysis, investigation, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing, visualization. Arman Homafar: Methodology, software, formal analysis, investigation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Code availability

The source code of the proposed method required to reproduce the predictions and results is available at the public Github repository https://github.com/PariaGhaheri/Classification_of_Parkinson_Disease/.

Data availability statement

Publicly available Parkinson Dataset with replicated acoustic features was used in this study, which is available at UCI Machine Learning Repository https://github.com/PariaGhaheri/Classification_of_Parkinson_Disease/.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.