This work is focused on deep learning methods, such as feedforward neural network (FNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), for pathological voice detection using mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), linear prediction cepstrum coefficients (LPCCs), and higher-order statistics (HOSs) parameters. In total, 518 voice data samples were obtained from the publicly available Saarbruecken voice database (SVD), comprising recordings of 259 healthy and 259 pathological women and men, respectively, and using /a/, /i/, and /u/ vowels at normal pitch. Significant differences were observed between the normal and the pathological voice signals for normalized skewness (p = 0.000) and kurtosis (p = 0.000), except for normalized kurtosis (p = 0.051) that was estimated in the /u/ samples in women. These parameters are useful and meaningful for classifying pathological voice signals. The highest accuracy, 82.69%, was achieved by the CNN classifier with the LPCCs parameter in the /u/ vowel in men. The second-best performance, 80.77%, was obtained with a combination of the FNN classifier, MFCCs, and HOSs for the /i/ vowel samples in women. There was merit in combining the acoustic measures with HOS parameters for better characterization in terms of accuracy. The combination of various parameters and deep learning methods was also useful for distinguishing normal from pathological voices.

The objective of this research was to develop deep learning classifiers and various parameters that provide an accurate and objective system for classifying elderly and young voice signals. This work focused on deep learning methods, such as feedforward neural network (FNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), for the detection of elderly voice signals using mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and linear prediction cepstrum coefficients (LPCCs), skewness, as well as kurtosis parameters. In total, 126 subjects (63 elderly and 63 young) were obtained from the Saarbruecken voice database. The highest performance of 93.75% appeared when the skewness was added to the MFCC and MFCC delta parameters, although the fusion of the skewness and kurtosis parameters had a positive effect on the overall accuracy of the classification. The results of this study also revealed that the performance of FNN was higher than that of CNN. Most parameters estimated from male data samples demonstrated good performance in terms of gender. Rather than using mixed female and male data, this work recommends the development of separate systems that represent the best performance through each optimized parameter using data from independent male and female samples.