cs.LGAug 19, 2026

Fuzzy Accuracy Compensates for Label Subjectivity in Classification of Skin Tone Using Wearable Photoplethysmography Signals

Authors: Padmini Krishnadas, Urs Hackstein, Alen Bosnjakovic, Philip J. Aston

Organizations: Data Science and AI Department National Physical Laboratory Teddington, UK · Faculty of Life Science Engineering Mittelhessen University of Applied Sciences Giessen, Germany · Laboratory for Mass and Related Quantities Institute of Metrology of Bosnia and Herzegovina Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

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Abstract

We consider the problem of classification of skin tone using photoplethysmography (PPG) signals with labels of the ordinal six-class Fitzpatrick skin tones. A typical accuracy for this task is a poor 40-55 %. However, the labels are subjectively determined by comparing the skin with a colour chart, and hence contain widespread small-scale inaccuracies. By working with a "fuzzy accuracy", which deems a prediction of skin tone class to be correct if its difference from the labelled class is not greater than one, much higher accuracy is obtained which provides more convincing evidence that skin tone can be accurately predicted from PPG signals. Three machine learning approaches were used, namely deep learning or tree-based approaches on raw PPG signals, deep learning on image representations of the signals generated by the Symmetric Projection Attractor Reconstruction (SPAR) method, and machine learning on features extracted from the signals. The first method also employed a fuzzy version of the cross entropy loss function, which gave the best results. Tree-based models on raw signals give accuracies up to 55 % and higher fuzzy accuracies up to 96 %, while deep learning models on the SPAR images obtained lower results of 44 % accuracy and 85 % fuzzy accuracy. The machine learning on PPG features gave similar results to the SPAR method with accuracy of 42 % and fuzzy accuracy of 87 %. We have shown that classification of skin tone using PPG signals is possible with high fuzzy accuracy which implies that our modelling approach enables accurate prediction of skin tone class within at most one class of the observer's choice of class, from which we conclude that PPG signals are affected by skin tone in a discernible way.

Figures & tables

Fig. 1 : The number of records in each skin tone class for which optical quality ≥0.65\geq 0.65 .
Fig. 2 : A PPG signal (top) and the corresponding SPAR attractor (bottom).
Fig. 3 : Confusion matrix over 5-fold cross validation for the Gradient boosted decision tree model with fuzzy cross entropy loss function trained on raw signals.
   Fuzzy
ClassifierLoss FunctionAccuracyAccuracy
GBTCross entropy0.55020.9561
GBTFuzzy cross entropy0.53360.9594
GBTMultinomial log likelihood0.55030.9561
GBTFuzzy multinomial log likelihood0.45850.9339
RFStandard0.53320.9531
TABLE I : Accuracy and fuzzy accuracy values for different classifiers and loss functions applied to the raw signals. The best results are shown in bold. GBT = Gradient boosted decision tree, RF = Random forest classifier
Fig. 4 : Confusion matrix over 5-fold cross-validation using VGG16 with EMD loss trained on SPAR images.
Fig. 5 : Confusion matrix over 5-fold cross-validation for the neural network model using PPG Features.
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