Detecting Screams From Home Audio Recordings to Identify Tantrums: Exploratory Study Using Transfer Machine Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Qualitative self- or parent-reports used in assessing children's behavioral disorders are often inconvenient to collect and can be misleading due to missing information, rater biases, and limited validity. A data-driven approach to quantify behavioral disorders could alleviate these concerns. This study proposes a machine learning approach to identify screams in voice recordings that avoids the need to gather large amounts of clinical data for model training. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study is to evaluate if a machine learning model trained only on publicly available audio data sets could be used to detect screaming sounds in audio streams captured in an at-home setting. METHODS: Two sets of audio samples were prepared to evaluate the model: a subset of the publicly available AudioSet data set and a set of audio data extracted from the TV show Supernanny, which was chosen for its similarity to clinical data. Scream events were manually annotated for the Supernanny data, and existing annotations were refined for the AudioSet data. Audio feature extraction was performed with a convolutional neural network pretrained on AudioSet. A gradient-boosted tree model was trained and cross-validated for scream classification on the AudioSet data and then validated independently on the Supernanny audio. RESULTS: On the held-out AudioSet clips, the model achieved a receiver operating characteristic (ROC)-area under the curve (AUC) of 0.86. The same model applied to three full episodes of Supernanny audio achieved an ROC-AUC of 0.95 and an average precision (positive predictive value) of 42% despite screams only making up 1.3% (n=92/7166 seconds) of the total run time. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that a scream-detection model trained with publicly available data could be valuable for monitoring clinical recordings and identifying tantrums as opposed to depending on collecting costly privacy-protected clinical data for model training.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".