Machine learning-based classification of bronze alloy cymbals from microphone captured data enhanced with feature selection approaches

• Published in: Expert systems with applications 2023-04, Vol.215, p.119378, Article 119378
• Main Authors: Boratto, Tales H.A., Cury, Alexandre A., Goliatt, Leonardo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Audio information retrieval; Bronze alloys; Data acquisition; Feature selection; Machine learning; Musical instruments
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2022.119378

The curse of dimensionality is a common problem in classification tasks. However, feature selection is an exciting approach to deal with this type of problem by searching for a suboptimal feature set, either by eliminating irrelevant attributes, those with redundant information, or even both. Furthermore, although the use of machine learning techniques for the classification of drum cymbals is found in the literature, little attention has been paid to approaches that focus on classifying these instruments according to their bronze alloys. This paper aims to explore and evaluate the temporal information retrieved from audios, using TSFEL (Time Series Feature Extraction Library) as a tool to extract 18 temporal attributes, three feature selection approaches to assess these features, and logistic regression as a classifier. To this end, 276 audios referring to four drum cymbals of three different bronze alloys were captured in the studio through a sound acquisition procedure that took into account environment and microphone variations. Hence, one expects to find an optimal subset of features that contains enough information from the audios to achieve the best classification performance in the proposed problem. The experimental results show that a feature selection approach sequentially based on L1 Regularization and Correlation Analysis was able to find a subset consisting of 5 attributes that achieved an average accuracy of 97.08%. •The computational model can identify the cymbals’ bronze alloys through their sound.•A standardized impact procedure is developed for the audio signals acquisition.•Feature selection could reduce the dimensionality up to 70%, improving accuracy.•Logistic Regression with feature selection achieved high material classification rate.•High accuracy is attained even considering different sound capture perspectives.