Gun violence has been on the rise in recent years. To help curb the downward spiral of this negative influence in communities, machine learning strategies on gunshot detection can be developed and deployed. After outlining the procedure by which a typical type of gunshot-like sounds were measured, this paper focuses on the analysis of feature importance pertaining to gunshot and gunshot-like sounds. The random forest mean decrease in impurity and the SHapley Additive exPlanations feature importance analysis were employed for this task. From the feature importance analysis, feature reduction was then carried out. Via the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients feature extraction process on 1-sec audio clips, these extracted features were then reduced to a more manageable quantity using the above-mentioned feature reduction processes. These reduced features were sent to a random forest classifier. The SHapley Additive exPlanations feature importance output was compared to that of the mean decrease in impurity feature importance. The results show what Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients features are important in discriminating gunshot sounds and various gunshot-like sounds. Together with the feature importance/reduction processes, the recent uniform manifold approximation and projection method was used to compare the closeness of various gunshot-like sounds to gunshot sounds in the feature space. Finally, the approach presented in this paper provides people with a viable means to make gunshot sounds more discernible from other sounds.
Keywords: Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients; SHapley Additive exPlanations; gunshot; gunshot-like; random forest; uniform manifold and projection.