Dolphin Health Classifications from Whistle Features.

Jones, Brittany; Sportelli, Jessica; Karnowski, Jeremy; McClain, Abby; Cardoso, David; Du, Maximilian

Bottlenose dolphins often conceal behavioral signs of illness until they reach an advanced stage. Motivated by the efficacy of vocal biomarkers in human health diagnostics, we utilized supervised machine learning methods to assess various model architectures' effectiveness in classifying dolphin health status from the acoustic features of their whistles. A gradient boosting classifier achieved a 72.3% accuracy in distinguishing between normal and abnormal health states—a significant improvement over chance (permutation test; 1000 iterations, p < 0.001). The model was trained on 30,693 whistles from 15 dolphins and the test set (15%) totaled 3612 'normal' and 1775 'abnormal' whistles. The classifier identified the health status of the dolphin from the whistles features with 72.3% accuracy, 73.2% recall, 56.1% precision, and a 63.5% F1 score. These findings suggest the encoding of internal health information within dolphin whistle features, with indications that the severity of illness correlates with classification accuracy, notably in its success for identifying 'critical' cases (94.2%). The successful development of this diagnostic tool holds promise for furnishing a passive, non-invasive, and cost-effective means for early disease detection in bottlenose dolphins.

SUPERVISED learning; SEVERITY of illness index; EARLY diagnosis; MACHINE learning; BIOACOUSTICS; BOTTLENOSE dolphin; DOLPHINS

Journal of Marine Science & Engineering, 2024, Vol 12, Issue 12, p2158

2077-1312

Academic Journal

10.3390/jmse12122158