Toward Interpretable Voice-Based Parkinson’s Disease Screening via Joint Transfer Function–Feature–Classifier–Ensemble Selection

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis relies on subjective clinical examination of motor signs that can be mild, intermittent, or absent early in the disease course, motivating objective, low-cost, non-invasive markers for earlier, more consistent detection. Voice recordings, acquirable with nothing more than a microphone, are a strong candidate, and this study develops a machine learning pipeline for voice-based PD screening built on the Competitive Swarm Optimizer (CSO), which jointly searches the acoustic feature subset, classifier configuration, and binarization transfer function, instead of optimizing the feature subset alone as most prior pipelines do. Evaluated on two public, subject-grouped voice datasets, Oxford and Naranjo, against five baselines under an identical protocol across 20 runs per method, our proposed pipeline attains the highest mean balanced accuracy on Naranjo with 0.847 and the second-highest on Oxford with 0.810, accuracies consistent with the wider voice-based PD screening literature; because this evidence comes from two small, single-recording-protocol, retrospective public datasets of 31 and 80 subjects each, we present it as an initial, encouraging step toward a first-pass triage or between-visit monitoring tool, pending external validation on a prospectively collected, multi-site cohort, not as a standalone diagnostic instrument. As an initial step toward clinical interpretability, we check which acoustic features are selected most consistently across 20 repeated runs of the proposed pipeline against established physiological correlates of Parkinsonian dysphonia; agreement between any two runs’ complete feature subsets is weak, but pitch period entropy, a nonlinear-dynamical measure of aperiodic pitch period variability, is selected far more often than chance on both datasets, consistent with the underlying pathophysiology and not merely predictive. These results support voice-based, metaheuristic-optimized screening as a plausible, interpretable, low-burden tool for telemedicine and home monitoring.