An Analysis of Rhythmic Staccato-Vocalization Based on Frequency Demodulation for Laughter Detection in Conversational Meetings

Human laugh is able to convey various kinds of meanings in human communications. There exists various kinds of human laugh signal, for example: vocalized laugh and non vocalized laugh. Following the theories of psychology, among all the vocalized laugh type, rhythmic staccato-vocalization significantly evokes the positive responses in the interactions. In this paper we attempt to exploit this observation to detect human laugh occurrences, i.e., the laughter, in multiparty conversations from the AMI meeting corpus. First, we separate the high energy frames from speech, leaving out the low energy frames through power spectral density estimation. We borrow the algorithm of rhythm detection from the area of music analysis to use that on the high energy frames. Finally, we detect rhythmic laugh frames, analyzing the candidate rhythmic frames using statistics. This novel approach for detection of `positive' rhythmic human laughter performs better than the standard laughter classification baseline.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, conference pape

Reconnoitering the class distinguishing abilities of the features, to know them better

The relevance of machine learning (ML) in our daily lives is closely intertwined with its explainability. Explainability can allow end-users to have a transparent and humane reckoning of a ML scheme's capability and utility. It will also foster the user's confidence in the automated decisions of a system. Explaining the variables or features to explain a model's decision is a need of the present times. We could not really find any work, which explains the features on the basis of their class-distinguishing abilities (specially when the real world data are mostly of multi-class nature). In any given dataset, a feature is not equally good at making distinctions between the different possible categorizations (or classes) of the data points. In this work, we explain the features on the basis of their class or category-distinguishing capabilities. We particularly estimate the class-distinguishing capabilities (scores) of the variables for pair-wise class combinations. We validate the explainability given by our scheme empirically on several real-world, multi-class datasets. We further utilize the class-distinguishing scores in a latent feature context and propose a novel decision making protocol. Another novelty of this work lies with a \emph{refuse to render decision} option when the latent variable (of the test point) has a high class-distinguishing potential for the likely classes.Comment: changed the article thoroughl

Periodicity of quasar and galaxy redshift

Context. An approach for studying the large-scale structure of the Universe lies in the detection and analysis of periodicity of redshift values of extragalactic objects, galaxies, and quasi stellar objects (QSO), in particular. Moreover, the hypothesis of the existence of multiple periodicities in the redshift distributions deserves exploration. The task is compounded by the presence of confounding effects and measurement noise. Aims. Studies of periodicity detection in redshift values of extragalactic objects obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have been conducted in the past, largely based on the Fourier transform. The present study aims to revisit the same thing using the singular value decomposition (SVD) as the primary tool. Methods. Periodicity detection and the determination of the fundamental period have been performed using a standard spectral approach as well as a SVD-based approach for a variety of simulated datasets. The analysis of the quasar redshift data from DR12 and galaxy redshift dataset of DR10 from SDSS data has been carried out. Results. A wide range of periodicities are observed in different redshift ranges of the quasar datasets. For redshifts greater than 0.03, a period length of 0.2094 was determined while periodicities of 0.1210 and 0.0654 were obtained for redshift ranges (0.03,1) and (3,4), respectively. Twin periodicities of 0.1153 and 0.0807 were obtained for the redshift range (1,3). Determining the ranges to be examined has been done based on histogram computation; the binwidths of which have been obtained by employing a kernel density estimation. The redshift sequence for the galaxy samples exhibits a somewhat different nature, but still contains periodic components. Twin periodicities of 0.0056 and 0.0079 were observed for a redshift range greater than 0.03. Conclusions. Galaxy and quasar redshift values form sequences, which are not only discrete in amplitude but also contain periodic components. The superiority of the singular value decomposition method over the spectral estimation approach, in redshift periodicity analysis especially from the point of view of robustness, is demonstrated through simulations. The existence of periodicity for quasar and galaxy families is thus firmly established, lending further support to the Hoyle-Narlikar variable mass theory