Acoustic scene classification by ensembling gradient boosting machine and convolutional neural networks

Abstract

This work describes our contribution to the acoustic scene classifi- cation task of the DCASE 2017 challenge. We propose a system that consists of the ensemble of two methods of different nature: a feature engineering approach, where a collection of hand-crafted features is input to a Gradient Boosting Machine, and another approach based on learning representations from data, where log-scaled melspectrograms are input to a Convolutional Neural Network. This CNN is designed with multiple filter shapes in the first layer. We use a simple late fusion strategy to combine both methods. We report classification accuracy of each method alone and the ensemble system on the provided cross-validation setup of TUT Acoustic Scenes 2017 dataset. The proposed system outperforms each of its component methods and improves the provided baseline system by 8.2%.