Classifier Subset Selection for the Stacked Generalization Method Applied to Emotion Recognition in Speech

Ensemble Learning of Hybrid Acoustic Features for Speech Emotion Recognition

Automatic recognition of emotion is important for facilitating seamless interactivity between a human being and intelligent robot towards the full realization of a smart society. The methods of signal processing and machine learning are widely applied to recognize human emotions based on features extracted from facial images, video files or speech signals. However, these features were not able to recognize the fear emotion with the same level of precision as other emotions. The authors propose the agglutination of prosodic and spectral features from a group of carefully selected features to realize hybrid acoustic features for improving the task of emotion recognition. Experiments were performed to test the effectiveness of the proposed features extracted from speech files of two public databases and used to train five popular ensemble learning algorithms. Results show that random decision forest ensemble learning of the proposed hybrid acoustic features is highly effective for speech emotion recognition.

Blister Defect Detection Based on Convolutional Neural Network for Polymer Lithium-Ion Battery

To ensure the quality and reliability of polymer lithium-ion battery (PLB), automatic blister defect detection instead of manual detection is developed in the production of PLB cell sheets. A convolutional neural network (CNN) based detection method is proposed to detect blister in cell sheets employing cell sheet images. An improved architecture for dense block and a learning method based on optimization of learning rate are discussed. The proposed method was superior to other machine learning based methods when the classification performance and confusion matrix were compared in experiments. The proposed CNN method had the best defect detection performance and real-time performance for industry field application.

Machine learning-XGBoost analysis of language networks to classify patients with epilepsy

Our goal was to apply a statistical approach to allow the identification of atypical language patterns and to differentiate patients with epilepsy from healthy subjects, based on their cerebral activity, as assessed by functional MRI (fMRI). Patients with focal epilepsy show reorganization or plasticity of brain networks involved in cognitive functions, inducing ‘atypical’ (compared to ‘typical’ in healthy people) brain profiles. Moreover, some of these patients suffer from drug-resistant epilepsy, and they undergo surgery to stop seizures. The neurosurgeon should only remove the zone generating seizures and must preserve cognitive functions to avoid deficits. To preserve functions, one should know how they are represented in the patient’s brain, which is in general different from that of healthy subjects. For this purpose, in the pre-surgical stage, robust and efficient methods are required to identify atypical from typical representations. Given the frequent location of regions generating seizures in the vicinity of language networks, one important function to be considered is language. The risk of language impairment after surgery is determined pre-surgically by mapping language networks. In clinical settings, cognitive mapping is classically performed with fMRI. The fMRI analyses allowing the identification of atypical patterns of language networks in patients are not sufficiently robust and require additional statistic approaches. In this study, we report the use of a statistical nonlinear machine learning classification, the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm, to identify atypical patterns and classify 55 participants as healthy subjects or patients with epilepsy. XGBoost analyses were based on neurophysiological features in five language regions (three frontal and two temporal) in both hemispheres and activated with fMRI for a phonological (PHONO) and a semantic (SEM) language task. These features were combined into 135 cognitively plausible subsets and further submitted to selection and binary classification. Classification performance was scored with the Area Under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Our results showed that the subset SEM_LH BA_47-21 (left fronto-temporal activation induced by the SEM task) provided the best discrimination between the two groups (AUC of 91 ± 5%). The results are discussed in the framework of the current debates of language reorganization in focal epilepsy.