Finding the Right Features for Instrument Classification of Classical Music

In tackling data mining and pattern recognition tasks, finding a compact but effective set of features is often a crucial step in the whole problem solving process. In this paper we present an empirical study on feature selection for classical instrument recognition, using machine learning techniques to select and evaluate features extracted from a number of different feature schemes in terms of their classification performance. It is revealed that there is significant redundancy in existing feature schemes commonly used in practice. Our results suggest that further feature analysis research is necessary for optimising feature selection for the instrument recognition problem