Machine Learning-Based Models for Early Stage Detection of Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a group of neurodevelopmental disabilities that are not curable but may be ameliorated by early interventions. We gathered early-detected ASD datasets relating to toddlers, children, adolescents and adults, and applied several feature transformation methods, including log, Z-score and sine functions to these datasets. Various classification techniques were then implemented with these transformed ASD datasets and assessed for their performance. We found SVM showed the best performance for the toddler dataset, while Adaboost gave the best results for the children dataset, Glmboost for the adolescent and Adaboost for the adult datasets. The feature transformations resulting in the best classifications was sine function for toddler and Z-score for children and adolescent datasets. After these analyses, several feature selection techniques were used with these Z-score-transformed datasets to identify the significant ASD risk factors for the toddler, child, adolescent and adult subjects. The results of these analytical approaches indicate that, when appropriately optimised, machine learning methods can provide good predictions of ASD status. This suggests that it may possible to apply these models for the detection of ASD in its early stages.