A Hierarchical Feature Engineering Framework for Automated Classification of Phonotraumatic and Non-Phonotraumatic Vocal Hyperfunction
Authors: June-Woo Kim, Kangwook Jang, Minu Kim, Hyunju Lee
Organizations: Department of Electronic Engineering, Wonkwang University, Republic of Korea · AI Convergence Research Institute, Wonkwang University, Republic of Korea · GIST InnoCORE AI-Nano Convergence Institute for Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea · School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Republic of Korea · Department of AI Convergence, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea
Ambulatory neck-surface acceleration enables non-invasive monitoring of vocal hyperfunction, yet robust biomarkers for its subtypes remain limited. This study investigates the NeckVibe Challenge dataset to distinguish phonotraumatic (PVH) and non-phonotraumatic (NPVH) from healthy controls. We propose a hierarchical feature engineering framework comprising: (i) static, (ii) dynamic, (iii) ratio-based, (iv) coupling features capturing source filter interactions. While univariate statistical analysis shows strong separability for PVH but limited significance for NPVH, our machine learning pipeline, tailored for high-dimensional feature integration, identifies that coupling features are crucial for both tasks. We achieve an AUC of 0.891 for PVH and 0.728 for NPVH, suggesting that while PVH is near-linearly separable, NPVH discrimination benefits from modeling non-linear feature interactions.