An Approach for Detecting Parkinson’s Disease by Integrating Optimal Feature Selection Strategies with Dense Multiscale Sample Entropy

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Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disorder that severely affects motor function, especially gait, requiring accurate diagnosis and assessment instruments. This study presents Dense Multiscale Sample Entropy (DM-SamEn) as an innovative method for diminishing feature dimensions while maintaining the uniqueness of signal features. DM-SamEn employs a weighting mechanism that considers the dynamic properties of the signal, thereby reducing redundancy and improving the distinctiveness of features extracted from vertical ground reaction force (VGRF) signals in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Subsequent to the extraction process, correlation-based feature selection (CFS) and sequential backward selection (SBS) refine feature sets, improving algorithmic accuracy. To validate the feature extraction and selection stage, three classifiers—Adaptive Weighted K-Nearest Neighbors (AW-KNN), Radial Basis Function Support Vector Machine (RBF-SVM), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP)—were employed to evaluate classification efficacy and ascertain optimal performance across selection strategies, including CFS, SBS, and the hybrid SBS-CFS approach. K-fold cross-validation was employed to provide improved evaluation of model performance by assessing the model on various data subsets, thereby mitigating the risk of overfitting and augmenting the robustness of the results. As a result, the model demonstrated a significant ability to differentiate between PD patients and healthy controls, with classification accuracy reported as ACC [CI 95%: 97.82–98.5%] for disease identification and ACC [CI 95%: 96.3–97.3%] for severity assessment. Optimal performance was primarily achieved through feature sets chosen using SBS and the integrated SBS-CFS methods. The findings highlight the model’s potential as an effective instrument for diagnosing PD and assessing its severity, contributing to advancements in clinical management of the condition.