applied sciences Article Toward Audio Beehive Monitoring: Deep Learning vs. Standard Machine Learning in Classifying Beehive Audio Samples Vladimir Kulyukin *, Sarbajit Mukherjee and Prakhar Amlathe Department of Computer Science, Utah State University, 4205 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT 84322-4205, USA;
[email protected] (V.K);
[email protected] (S.M);
[email protected] (P.A.) * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 31 May 2018; Accepted: 30 August 2018; Published: 6 September 2018 Abstract: Electronic beehive monitoring extracts critical information on colony behavior and phenology without invasive beehive inspections and transportation costs. As an integral component of electronic beehive monitoring, audio beehive monitoring has the potential to automate the identification of various stressors for honeybee colonies from beehive audio samples. In this investigation, we designed several convolutional neural networks and compared their performance with four standard machine learning methods (logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, support vector machines, and random forests) in classifying audio samples from microphones deployed above landing pads of Langstroth beehives. On a dataset of 10,260 audio samples where the training and testing samples were separated from the validation samples by beehive and location, a shallower raw audio convolutional neural network with a custom layer outperformed three deeper raw audio convolutional neural networks without custom layers and performed on par with the four machine learning methods trained to classify feature vectors extracted from raw audio samples. On a more challenging dataset of 12,914 audio samples where the training and testing samples were separated from the validation samples by beehive, location, time, and bee race, all raw audio convolutional neural networks performed better than the four machine learning methods and a convolutional neural network trained to classify spectrogram images of audio samples.