Wave2Graph: Integrating spectral features and correlations for graph-based learning in sound waves

Abstract

This paper investigates a novel graph-based representation of sound waves inspired by the physical phenomenon of correlated vibrations. We propose a Wave2Graph framework for integrating multiple acoustic representations, including the spectrum of frequencies and correlations, into various neural computing architectures to achieve new state-of-the-art performances in sound classification. The capability and reliability of our end-to-end framework are evidently demonstrated in voice pathology for low-cost and non-invasive mass-screening of medical conditions, including respiratory illnesses and Alzheimer’s Dementia. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public benchmark datasets (ICBHI and ADReSSo) and our real-world dataset (IJSound: Respiratory disease detection using coughs and breaths). Wave2Graph framework consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with a large magnitude, up to 7.65% improvement, promising the usefulness of graph-based representation in signal processing and machine learning. The code and data will be made publicly available for reproducibility and future work.