Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurological illness which impairs motor skills, speech, and other functions such as mood, behavior, thinking, and sensation. It causes vocal impairment for approximately 90% of the patients. As the symptoms of PD occur gradually and mostly targeting the elderly people for whom physical visits to the clinic are inconvenient and costly, telemonitoring of the disease using measurements of dysphonia (vocal features) has a vital role in its early diagnosis. Such dysphonia features extracted from the voice come in variety and most of them are interrelated. The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to select a minimal subset of features with maximal joint relevance to the PD-score, a binary score indicating whether or not the sample belongs to a person with PD; and (2) to build a predictive model with minimal bias (i.e. to maximize the generalization of the predictions so as to perform well with unseen test examples). For these tasks, we apply the mutual information measure with the permutation test for assessing the relevance and the statistical significance of the relations between the features and the PD-score, rank the features according to the maximum-relevance-minimum-redundancy (mRMR) criterion, use a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for building a classification model and test it with a more suitable cross-validation scheme that we called leave-one-individual-out that fits with the dataset in hand better than the conventional bootstrapping or leave-one-out validation methods.
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