Multilayer perceptron-based self-care early prediction of children with disabilities

Early identification of children with self-care impairments is one of the key challenges professional therapists face due to the complex and time-consuming detection process using relevant self-care activities. Due to the complex nature of the problem, machine-learning methods have been widely applied in this area. In this study, a feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN)-based self-care prediction methodology, called multilayer perceptron (MLP)-progressive, has been proposed. The proposed methodology integrates unsupervised instance-based resampling and randomizing preprocessing techniques to MLP for improved early detection of self-care disabilities in children. Preprocessing of the dataset affects the MLP performance; hence, randomization and resampling of the dataset improves the performance of the MLP model. To confirm the usefulness of MLP-progressive, three experiments were conducted, including validating MLP-progressive methodology over multi-class and binary-class datasets, impact analysis of the proposed preprocessing filters on the model performance, and comparing the MLP-progressive results with state-of-the-art studies. The evaluation metrics accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, TP rate, FP rate, and ROC were used to measure performance of the proposed disability detection model. The proposed MLP-progressive model outperforms existing methods and attains a classification accuracy of 97.14% and 98.57% on multi-class and binary-class datasets, respectively. Additionally, when evaluated on the multi-class dataset, significant improvements in accuracies ranging from 90.00% to 97.14% were observed when compared to state-of-the-art methods.