Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Identification Using Feature-Based Machine Learning Classification Model

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that impairs the development of behaviors, communication, and learning abilities. Early detection of ASD helps patients to get beter training to communicate and interact with others. In this study, we identified ASD and non-ASD individuals using machine learning (ML) approaches. We used Gaussian naive Bayes (NB), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), random forest (RF), logistic regression (LR), Gaussian naive Bayes (NB), support vector machine (SVM) with linear basis function and decision tree (DT). We preprocessed the data using the imputation methods, namely linear regression, Mice forest, and Missforest. We selected the important features using the Simultaneous perturbation feature selection and ranking (SpFSR) technique from all 21 ASD features of three datasets combined (N=1,100 individuals) from University California Irvine (UCI) repository. We evaluated the performance of the method's discrimination, calibration, and clinical utility using a stratified 10-fold cross-validation method. We achieved the highest accuracy possible by using SVM with selected the most important 10 features. We observed the integration of imputation using linear regression, SpFSR and SVM as the most effective models, with an accuracy rate of 100% outperformed the previous studies in ASD prediciton