Distinction between healthy individuals and patients with confident abnormal respiration

To adequately distinguish between healthy individuals and patients with respiratory disorders, we propose a new classification method combining two conventional methods. The first method entails determining the presence of a "confident abnormal respiration" period (used to describe individuals for whom the likelihood of an abnormal respiratory candidate was much higher than for that of a normal candidate, and for which patients could be determined with high accuracy). The second method entails comparing the two total likelihoods (through a series of inspiration and expiration periods) of normal and abnormal candidates of each respiratory period in a test sample. In our new method, if one or more confident abnormal respiration phases are detected in a test respiration sample, the first method is used; otherwise, the second method is used for the classification. Our proposed method achieved significantly higher performance (88.6%) at the 5% level (p=0.027) than does each conventional classification method alone (80.6% and 84.9%). This validates our newly proposed classification method.