Detecting COVID-19 from Audio Recording of Coughs Using Random Forests and Support Vector Machines

Abstract

The detection of COVID-19 is and will remain in the foreseeable future a crucial challenge, making the development of tools for the task important.One possible approach, on the confines of speech and audio processing, is detecting potential COVID-19 cases based on cough sounds.We propose a simple, yet robust method based on the well-known ComParE 2016 feature set, and two classical machine learning models, namely Random Forests, and Support Vector Machines (SVMs).Furthermore, we combine the two methods, by calculating the weighted average of their predictions.Our results in the DiCOVA challenge show that this simple approach leads to a robust solution while producing competitive results.Based on the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC ROC) score, both classical machine learning methods we applied markedly outperform the baseline provided by the challenge organisers.Moreover, their combination attains an AUC ROC score of 85.21, positioning us at fourth place on the leaderboard (where the second team attained a similar, 85.43 score).Here, we would describe this system in more detail, and analyse the resulting models, drawing conclusions, and determining future work directions.