Speech-based diagnosis of autism spectrum condition by generative adversarial network representations

Machine learning paradigms based on child vocalisations show great promise as an objective marker of developmental disorders such as Autism. In conventional detection systems, hand-crafted acoustic features are usually fed into a discriminative classifier (e. g., Support Vector Machines); however it is well known that the accuracy and robustness of such a system is limited by the size of the associated training data. This paper explores, for the first time, the use of feature representations learnt using a deep Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for classifying children's speech affected by developmental disorders. A comparative evaluation of our proposed system with different acoustic feature sets is performed on the Child Pathological and Emotional Speech database. Key experimental results presented demonstrate that GAN based methods exhibit competitive performance with the conventional paradigms in terms of the unweighted average recall metric.