Early Screening of Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnoses of Children Using Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In today’s society, with fast-growing case rates, medical expenditures, social implications, and lengthy waiting periods after the first screening, there is a need for early screening that is both simple and effective for children who may be at risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is of utmost significance in light of the significant rise in the case rates of ASDs, as well as the associated medical expenses and social effects, in the contemporary world. In this study, utilizing methods from machine learning, a system was constructed, which was effective in obtaining high performance for identifying the early indicators of ASD in children. The study was carried out by the authors of this paper. The purpose of this research is to categorize ASD data in order to give a fast, easily available, and simple method for supporting the early identification of ASD. It was suggested to use machine learning methods, such as k-nearest neighbors, linear discriminant analysis, the support vector machine (SVM) method, and the random forests (RF) method, to divide populations into those who have ASD and those who do not have it. These machine learning algorithms were examined and tested using standard data collected from the machine learning repository, which contains two classes: normal and autism. The dataset was split into a training portion of 80% and a testing portion of 20%. In their separate testing, both the SVM and RF algorithms achieved a level of accuracy that was exceptional (100%). In addition, the sensitivity analysis method was used to estimate the amount of inaccuracy that would be present between the values that were intended to be achieved and the values that were predicted. The findings of the sensitivity analysis revealed that both SVM and RF had an R 2 = 100% in both the phases. When the results obtained were compared with those of the current systems, it was found that the suggested algorithms performed better than that of existing systems. It is very important to diagnose ASD as early as possible. The machine learning algorithms obtained a high level of accuracy in the diagnosis of ASD. When it comes to the categorization of ASD data, the SVM and RF approaches exhibit the best results among the two different classification approaches.