Integrated Age Estimation Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integrated age estimation framework that combines traditional and pathological methods through decision-level fusion, effectively reducing errors and improving classification accuracy across diverse datasets.

Contribution

It proposes a novel fusion-based age estimation mechanism that optimally weights traditional and pathological models to enhance accuracy and reduce errors, especially for normal control groups.

Findings

Improves age classification accuracy across datasets.

Reduces estimation error for normal control groups.

Provides a flexible framework for constructing age estimation algorithms.

Abstract

Machine-learning-based age estimation has received lots of attention. Traditional age estimation mechanism focuses estimation age error, but ignores that there is a deviation between the estimated age and real age due to disease. Pathological age estimation mechanism the author proposed before introduces age deviation to solve the above problem and improves classification capability of the estimated age significantly. However,it does not consider the age estimation error of the normal control (NC) group and results in a larger error between the estimated age and real age of NC group. Therefore, an integrated age estimation mechanism based on Decision-Level fusion of error and deviation orientation model is proposed to solve the problem.Firstly, the traditional age estimation and pathological age estimation mechanisms are weighted together.Secondly, their optimal weights are obtained by minimizing mean absolute error (MAE) between the estimated age and real age of normal people. In the experimental section, several representative age-related datasets are used for verification of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed age estimation mechanism achieves a good tradeoff effect of age estimation. It not only improves the classification ability of the estimated age, but also reduces the age estimation error of the NC group. In general, the proposed age estimation mechanism is effective. Additionally, the mechanism is a framework mechanism that can be used to construct different specific age estimation algorithms, contributing to relevant research.