Abstract
Many real-world time-series analysis problems are characterised by scarce
data. Solutions typically rely on hand-crafted features extracted from the time
or frequency domain allied with classification or regression engines which
condition on this (often low-dimensional) feature vector. The huge advances
enjoyed by many application domains in recent years have been fuelled by the
use of deep learning architectures trained on large data sets. This paper
presents an application of deep learning for acoustic event detection in a
challenging, data-scarce, real-world problem. Our candidate challenge is to
accurately detect the presence of a mosquito from its acoustic signature. We
develop convolutional neural networks (CNNs) operating on wavelet
transformations of audio recordings. Furthermore, we interrogate the network's
predictive power by visualising statistics of network-excitatory samples. These
visualisations offer a deep insight into the relative informativeness of
components in the detection problem. We include comparisons with conventional
classifiers, conditioned on both hand-tuned and generic features, to stress the
strength of automatic deep feature learning. Detection is achieved with
performance metrics significantly surpassing those of existing algorithmic
methods, as well as marginally exceeding those attained by individual human
experts.