In this paper, a method for evaluating the chronological age of adolescents on the basis of their voice signal is presented. For every examined child, the vowels a, e, i, o and u were recorded in extended phonation. Sixty voice parameters were extracted from each recording. Voice recordings were supplemented with height measurement in order to check if it could improve the accuracy of the proposed solution. Predictor selection was performed using the LASSO (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) algorithm. For age estimation, the random forest (RF) for regression method was employed and it was tested using a 10-fold cross-validation. The lowest absolute error (0.37 year ± 0.28) was obtained for boys only when all selected features were included into prediction. In all cases, the achieved accuracy was higher for boys than for girls, which results from the fact that the change of voice with age is larger for men than for women. The achieved results suggest that the presented approach can be employed for accurate age estimation during rapid development in children.

中文翻译：

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使用语音功能估算青少年年龄。

本文提出了一种基于语音信号评估青少年年龄的方法。对于每个接受检查的孩子，元音a，e，i，o和u都以扩展发声方式记录。从每个录音中提取了60个语音参数。语音记录补充了高度测量，以检查它是否可以提高建议解决方案的准确性。使用LASSO（最小绝对收缩和选择算子）算法进行预测变量选择。对于年龄估计，采用回归法的随机森林（RF），并使用10倍交叉验证对其进行了测试。仅当所有选定特征都纳入预测时，男孩的最低绝对误差（0.37年±0.28）才最低。在所有情况下，男孩达到的准确度均高于女孩，这是因为男性的声音随年龄的变化大于女性。取得的结果表明，所提出的方法可用于儿童快速发育期间的准确年龄估计。