Speech-Based Alzheimer's Detection Under Controlled Acoustic Perturbations: A Baseline Study of Class Imbalance and Robustness
Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects over 55 million people worldwide, and early detection through speech analysis offers a low-cost, non-invasive alternative to neuroimaging. However, clinical deployment of speech-based classifiers faces underexplored challenges: domain shifts across recording environments, li...