Fuzzy classification methods based diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease from speech test cases

Abstract

Background: Together with the Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease is considered as one of the two serious known neurodegenerative diseases. Physicians find it hard to predict whether a given patient has already developed or is expected to develop the Parkinson’s disease in the future. To overcome this difficulty, it is possible to develop a computing model, which analyzes the data related to a given patient and predicts with acceptable accuracy when he/she is anticipated to develop the Parkinson’s disease. Objectives: This paper contributes an attractive prediction framework based on some machine learning approaches for distinguishing people with Parkinsonism from healthy individuals. Methods: Several fuzzy classifiers such as Inductive Fuzzy Classifier, Fuzzy Rough Classifier and two types of neuro-fuzzy classifiers have been employed. Results: The fuzzy classifiers utilized in this study have been tested using the “Parkinson Speech Dataset with Multiple Types of Sound Recordings Data Set” of 40 subjects available on the UCI repository. Conclusion: The results achieved show that FURIA, MLP-Bagging-SGD, genfis2 and scg1 performed the best among the fuzzy rough, WEKA, adaptive neuro-fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy classifiers, respectively. The worst performance belongs to nearest neighborhood, IBK, genfis3 and scg3 among the formerly mentioned classifiers. The results reported in this paper are better in comparison to the results reported in Sakar et al., where the same dataset was used, with utilization of different classifiers. This demonstrates the applicability and effectiveness of the fuzzy classifiers used in this study as compared to the non-fuzzy classifiers used by Sakar et al.