Autism Spectrum Disorder Prediction in Children Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Life symptoms associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) typically manifest during childhood and persist into adolescence and adulthood. ASD, which can be caused by genetic or environmental factors, can be significantly improved through early detection and treatment. Currently, standardized clinical tests are the primary diagnostic method for ASD. However, these tests are time consuming and expensive. Early detection and intervention are pivotal in enhancing the long-term prospects of children diagnosed with ASD. Machine-learning (ML) techniques are being utilized alongside conventional methods to improve the accuracy and efficiency of ASD diagnosis. Therefore, the paper aims to explore the feasibility of employing support vector machines, random forest classifier, naïve Bayes, logistic regression (LR), K-nearest neighbor, and decision tree classification models on our dataset to construct predictive models for predicting and analyzing ASD problems across different age groups: children, adolescents, and adults. The proposed techniques are assessed using publicly available nonclinical ASD datasets of three distinct datasets. The four ASD datasets, namely toddlers, adolescents, children, and adults, were obtained from publicly available repositories, specifically Kaggle and UCI ML. These repositories provide a valuable data source for research and analysis related to ASD. Our main objective is to identify the susceptibility to ASD in children during the early stages, thereby streamlining the diagnosis process. Based on our findings, LR demonstrated the highest accuracy for the selected dataset.