Bias in Acoustic‐ and Linguistic‐based Classifications of Alzheimer’s Disease
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background It is crucial to identify patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). To do so, various attempts have been made to develop AI and non‐AI assessments, among which some focus on developing acoustic‐ and linguistic‐based classifiers. They are based on the detection of impairments in their language and speech, which can manifest years before other cognitive impairments associated with AD appear. The fact is that most of the current vocal and language classifiers of AD have been trained using the Pitt corpus, which is an imbalanced class and gender dataset. These two characteristics could be enough to bias such classifiers making them untrustworthy and unsuitable for integration into AD care settings. This paper presents a novel method for collecting vocal data to reduce the impact of potential sources of bias on acoustic and linguistic classifiers for AD. Method We will use a data collection approach that collects voices from participants (i.e., patients with AD and healthy controls) with diversity in race, gender, educational, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds. Participants will be asked to perform diverse language tasks, including word association, verbal fluency, and grammaticality judgment tasks. Following such an approach can ensure we collect oral data that wouldn’t be affected by selection, recruitment, sociolinguistics, and gender biases. Results The main result of this study is the creation of a benchmark vocal dataset from diverse gender and racial groups and ensuring that the data is representative of the population with AD. We expect such data to be used for evaluating and validating and help AI developers to successfully develop fair acoustic and linguistic classifiers of AD. It, in its turn, can motivate healthcare professionals to employ these systems as assistants to identify patients with AD from their voices quickly. Conclusion The Pitt corpus is a biased data set. Thus, acoustic and linguistic classifiers trained upon it can not be considered trustworthy AI systems. The AI developers that aim to deploy vocal systems into Alzheimer’s disease care settings would need unbiased vocal data. This study proposed a method to collect such verbal data.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it