Early dementia detection with speech analysis and machine learning techniques

Abstract

This in-depth study journey explores the context of natural language processing and text analysis in dementia detection, revealing their importance in a variety of fields. Beginning with an examination of the widespread and influence of text data. The dataset utilised in this study is from TalkBank's DementiaBank, which is basically a vast database of multimedia interactions built with the goal of examining communication patterns in the context of dementia. The various communication styles dementia patients exhibit when communicating with others are seen from a unique perspective by this specific dataset. Thorough data preprocessing procedures, including cleansing, tokenization, and structuring, are undertaken, with a focus on improving prediction capabilities through the combination of textual and non-textual information in the field of feature engineering. In the subsequent phase, the precision, recall, and F1-score metrics of Support Vector Machines (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Random Forest, and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are assessed. Empirical facts are synthesized using text analysis methods and models to formulate a coherent conclusion. The significance of text data analysis, the revolutionary potential of natural language processing, and the direction for future research are highlighted in this synthesis. Throughout this paper, readers are encouraged to leverage text data to embark on their own adventures in the evolving, data-centric world of dementia detection.