Voice Feature Selection to Improve Performance of Machine Learning Models for Voice Production Inversion

Objective. Estimation of physiological control parameters of the vocal system from the produced voice outcome has important applications in clinical management of voice disorders . Previously we developed a pressure from voice outcome features that characterize the acoustics of the produced voice. The goals of this study are to (1) explore the possibility of improving the estimation accuracy of physiological control parameters by including voice outcome features characterizing vocal fold vibration; and (2) identify voice feature sets that optimize both estimation accuracy and robustness to measurement noise.Methods. Feedforward neural networks are trained to solve the inversion problem of estimating the physiological control parameters of a three-dimensional body-cover vocal fold model from different sets of voice outcome features that characterize the simulated voice acoustics, glottal flow, and vocal fold vibration. A sensitivity analysis is then performed to evaluate the contribution of individual voice features to the overall performance of the neural networks in estimating the physiologic control parameters.Results and conclusions. While including voice outcome features characterizing vocal fold vibration increases estimation accuracy, it also reduces the network's robustness to measurement noise, due to high sensitivity of network performance to voice outcome features measuring the absolute amplitudes of the glottal flow and area waveforms, which are also difficult to measure accurately in practical applications. By excluding such glottal flow-based features and replacing glottal area-based features by their normalized counterparts, we are able to significantly improve both estimation accuracy and robustness to noise. We further show that similar estimation accuracy and robustness can be achieved with an even smaller set of voice outcome features by excluding features of small sensitivity.