Quantifying the Chaos Level of Infants' Environment via Unsupervised Learning

Abstract

Acoustic environments vary dramatically within the home setting. They can be a source of comfort and tranquility or chaos that can lead to less optimal cognitive development in children. Research to date has only subjectively measured household chaos. In this work, we use three unsupervised machine learning techniques to quantify household chaos in infants' homes. These unsupervised techniques include hierarchical clustering using K-Means, clustering using self-organizing map (SOM) and deep learning. We evaluated these techniques using data from 9 participants which is a total of 197 hours. Results show that these techniques are promising to quantify household chaos.