Robust and efficient Bayesian adaptive psychometric function estimation
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Published version
Author(s)
Doire, CSJ
Brookes, DM
Naylor, PA
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The efficient measurement of the threshold and slope of the psychometric function (PF) is an important objective in psychoacoustics. This paper proposes a procedure that combines a Bayesian estimate of the PF with either a look one-ahead or a look two-ahead method of selecting the next stimulus presentation. The procedure differs from previously proposed algorithms in two respects: (i) it does not require the range of possible PF parameters to be specified in advance and (ii) the sequence of probe signal-to-noise ratios optimizes the threshold and slope estimates at a performance level, ϕ, that can be chosen by the experimenter. Simulation results show that the proposed procedure is robust and that the estimates of both threshold and slope have a consistently low bias. Over a wide range of listener PF parameters, the root-mean-square errors after 50 trials were ∼1.2 dB in threshold and 0.14 in log-slope. It was found that the performance differences between the look one-ahead and look two-ahead methods were negligible and that an entropy-based criterion for selecting the next stimulus was preferred to a variance-based criterion.
Date Issued
2017-04-10
Date Acceptance
2017-03-20
Citation
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2017, 141 (4), pp.2501-2512
ISSN
0001-4966
Publisher
Acoustical Society of America
Start Page
2501
End Page
2512
Journal / Book Title
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Volume
141
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© 2017 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Sponsor
Commission of the European Communities
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Grant Number
PITN-GA-2012-316969
ep/m026698/1
Subjects
Acoustics
MD Multidisciplinary
Publication Status
Published