Detecting Mild Cognitive Impairment from Spontaneous Speech by Correlation-Based Phonetic Feature Selection

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), sometimes regarded as a prodromal stage of Alzheimer’s disease, is a mental disorder that is difficult to diagnose. Recent studies reported that MCI causes slight changes in the speech of the patient. Our previous studies showed that MCI can be efficiently classified by machine learning methods such as Support-Vector Machines and Random Forest, using features describing the amount of pause in the spontaneous speech of the subject. Furthermore, as hesitation is the most important indicator of MCI, we took special care when handling filled pauses, which usually correspond to hesitation. In contrast to our previous studies which employed manually constructed feature sets, we now employ (automatic) correlation-based feature selection methods to find the relevant feature subset for MCI classification. By analyzing the selected feature subsets we also show that features related to filled pauses are useful for MCI detection from speech samples.