Clustering Pathologic Voice with Kohonen SOM and Hierarchical Clustering

The main purpose of clustering voice pathologies is the attempt to form large groups of subjects with similar pathologies to be used with Deep-Learning. This paper focuses on applying Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps and Hierarchical Clustering to investigate how these methods behave in the clustering procedure of voice samples by means of the parameters absolute jitter, relative jitter, absolute shimmer, relative shimmer, HNR, NHR and Autocorrelation. For this, a comparison is made between the speech samples of the Control group of subjects, the Hyper-functional Dysphonia and Vocal Folds Paralysis pathologies groups of subjects. As a result, the dataset was divided in two clusters, with no distinction between the pre-defined groups of pathologies. The result is aligned with previous result using statistical analysis.