CLASSIFYING ANXIETY BASED ON A VOICERECORDING USING LEARNING ALGORITHMS

Abstract: Anxiety is becoming more and more common, seeking help to evaluate your anxiety canfirst of all take a long time, secondly, many of the tests are self-report assessments that could cause incorrect results. It has been shown there are several voice characteristics that are affected in people with anxiety. Knowing this, we got the idea that an algorithm can be developed to classify the amount of anxiety based on a person's voice. Our goal is that the developed algorithm can be used in collaboration with today's evaluation methods to increase the validity of anxiety evaluation. The algorithm would, in our opinion, give a more objective result than self-report assessments. In this thesis we answer questions such as “Is it possible toclassify anxiety based on a speech recording?”, as well as if deep learning algorithms perform better than machine learning algorithms on such a task. To answer the research questions we compiled a data set containing samples of people speaking with a varying degree of anxiety applied to their voice. We then implemented two algorithms able to classify the samples from our data set. One of the algorithms was a machine learning algorithm (ANN) with manual feature extraction, and the other one was a deep learning model (CNN) with automatic feature extraction. The performance of the two models were compared, and it was concluded that ANN was the better algorithm. When evaluating the models a 5-fold cross validation was used with a data split of 80/20. Every fold contains 100 epochs meaning we train both the models for a total of 500 epochs. For every fold the accuracy, precision, and recall is calculated. From these metrics we have then calculated other metrics such as sensitivity and specificity to compare the models. The ANN model performed a lot better than the CNN model on every single metric that was measured: accuracy, sensitivity, precision, f1-score, recall andspecificity.