  This paper proposes an effective modelling of sound event spectra with a
hidden data-size-imbalance, for improved Acoustic Event Detection (AED). The
proposed method models each event as an aggregated representation of a few
latent factors, while conventional approaches try to find acoustic elements
directly from the event spectra. In the method, all the latent factors across
all events are assigned comparable importance and complexity to overcome the
hidden imbalance of data-sizes in event spectra. To extract latent factors in
each event, the proposed method employs clustering and performs non-negative
matrix factorization to each latent factor, and learns its acoustic elements as
a sub-dictionary. Separate sub-dictionary learning effectively models the
acoustic elements with limited data-sizes and avoids over-fitting due to hidden
imbalances in training data. For the task of polyphonic sound event detection
from DCASE 2013 challenge, an AED based on the proposed modelling achieves a
detection F-measure of 46.5%, a significant improvement of more than 19% as
compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.
