A semi-supervised algorithm for improving the consistency of crowdsourced datasets: The COVID-19 case study on respiratory disorder classification

Background and Objective: Cough audio signal classification is a potentially useful tool in screening for respiratory disorders, such as COVID-19. Since it is dangerous to collect data from patients with contagious diseases, many research teams have turned to crowdsourcing to quickly gather cough sound data. The COUGHVID dataset enlisted expert physicians to annotate and diagnose the underlying diseases present in a limited number of recordings. However, this approach suffers from potential cough mislabeling, as well as disagreement between experts. Methods: In this work, we use a semi-supervised learning (SSL) approach – based on audio signal processing tools and interpretable machine learning models – to improve the labeling consistency of the COUGHVID dataset for 1) COVID-19 versus healthy cough sound classification 2) distinguishing wet from dry coughs, and 3) assessing cough severity. First, we leverage SSL expert knowledge aggregation techniques to overcome the labeling inconsistencies and label sparsity in the dataset. Next, our SSL approach is used to identify a subsample of re-labeled COUGHVID audio samples that can be used to train or augment future cough classifiers. Results: The consistency of the re-labeled COVID-19 and healthy data is demonstrated in that it exhibits a high degree of inter-class feature separability: 3x higher than that of the user-labeled data. Similarly, the SSL method increases this separability by 11.3x for cough type and 5.1x for severity classifications. Furthermore, the spectral differences in the user-labeled audio segments are amplified in the re-labeled data, resulting in significantly different power spectral densities between healthy and COVID-19 coughs in the 1-1.5 kHz range (𝑝 = 1.2 × 10−64 ), which demonstrates both the increased consistency of the new dataset and its explainability from an acoustic perspective. Finally, we demonstrate how the re-labeled dataset can be used to train a COVID-19 classifier, achieving an AUC of 0.797. Conclusions: We propose a SSL expert knowledge aggregation technique for the field of cough sound classification for the first time, and demonstrate how it can be used to combine the medical knowledge of multiple experts in an explainable fashion, thus providing abundant, consistent data for cough classification tasks.