A new diagnostic autism spectrum disorder (DASD) strategy using ensemble diagnosis methodology based on blood tests

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disease that impacts a child's way of behavior and social communication. In early childhood, children with ASD typically exhibit symptoms such as difficulty in social interaction, limited interests, and repetitive behavior. Although there are symptoms of ASD disease, most people do not understand these symptoms and therefore do not have enough knowledge to determine whether or not a child has ASD. Thus, early detection of ASD children based on accurate diagnosis model based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques is a critical process to reduce the spread of the disease and control it early. Through this paper, a new Diagnostic Autism Spectrum Disorder (DASD) strategy is presented to quickly and accurately detect ASD children. DASD contains two layers called Data Filter Layer (DFL) and Diagnostic Layer (DL). Feature selection and outlier rejection processes are performed in DFL to filter the ASD dataset from less important features and incorrect data before using the diagnostic or detection method in DL to accurately diagnose the patients. In DFL, Binary Gray Wolf Optimization (BGWO) technique is used to select the most significant set of features while Binary Genetic Algorithm (BGA) technique is used to eliminate invalid training data. Then, Ensemble Diagnosis Methodology (EDM) as a new diagnostic technique is used in DL to quickly and precisely diagnose ASD children. In this paper, the main contribution is EDM that consists of several diagnostic models including Enhanced K-Nearest Neighbors (EKNN) as one of them. EKNN represents a hybrid technique consisting of three methods called K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Chimp Optimization Algorithm (COA). NB is used as a weighed method to convert data from feature space to weight space. Then, COA is used as a data generation method to reduce the size of training dataset. Finally, KNN is applied on the reduced data in weight space to quickly and accurately diagnose ASD children based on new training dataset with small size. ASD blood tests dataset is used to test the proposed DASD strategy against other recent strategies [1]. It is concluded that the DASD strategy is superior to other strategies based on many performance measures including accuracy, error, recall, precision, micro_average precision, macro_average precision, micro_average recall, macro_average recall, F1-measure, and implementation-time with values equal to 0.93, 0.07, 0.83, 0.82, 0.80, 0.83, 0.79, 0.81, 0.79, and 1.5 s respectively.