Analysis and Detection of Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Machine Learning Techniques

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neuro-disorder in which a person has a lifelong effect on interaction and communication with others. Autism can be diagnosed at any stage in once life and is said to be a behavioral disease because in the first two years of life symptoms usually appear. According to the ASD problem starts with childhood and continues to keep going on into adolescence and adulthood. Propelled with the rise in use of machine learning techniques in the research dimensions of medical diagnosis, in this paper there is an attempt to explore the possibility to use Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, KNN, Neural Network and Convolutional Neural Network for predicting and analysis of ASD problems in a child, adolescents, and adults. The proposed techniques are evaluated on publicly available three different non-clinically ASD datasets. First dataset related to ASD screening in children has 292 instances and 21 attributes. Second dataset related to ASD screening Adult subjects contains a total of 704 instances and 21 attributes. Third dataset related to ASD screening in Adolescent subjects comprises of 104 instances and 21 attributes. After applying various machine learning techniques and handling missing values, results strongly suggest that CNN based prediction models work better on all these datasets with higher accuracy of 99.53%, 98.30%, 96.88% for Autistic Spectrum Disorder Screening in Data for Adult, Children, and Adolescents respectively. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.