ELM and K-nn machine learning in classification of breath sounds signals

The acquisition of Breath sounds (BS) signals from a human respiratory system with an electronic stethoscope, provide and offer prominent information which helps the doctors to diagnosis and classification of pulmonary diseases. Unfortunately, this BS signals with other biological signals have a non-stationary nature according to the variation of the lung volume, and this nature makes it difficult to analyze and classify between several diseases. In this study, we were focused on comparing the ability of the extreme learning machine (ELM) and k-nearest neighbour (K-nn) machine learning algorithms in the classification of adventitious and normal breath sounds. To do so, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) was used in this work to analyze BS, this method is rarely used in the breath sounds analysis. After the EMD decomposition of the signals into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs), the Hjorth descriptors (Activity) and Permutation Entropy (PE) features were extracted from each IMFs and combined for classification stage. The study has found that the combination of features (activity and PE) yielded an accuracy of 90.71%, 95% using ELM and K-nn respectively in binary classification (normal and abnormal breath sounds), and 83.57%, 86.42% in multiclass classification (five classes)