ABSTRACT Purpose The earlier prediction of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) placed a serious attention on ensuring the appropriate intervention to improve the child's behavioral, cognitive, and social development. The previous detection process is commonly time‐intensive, subjective, and highly dependent on the clinical professions, which leads to limited accessibility in rural areas. The difficulties are addressed by introducing effective ASD detection systems, which provide a scalable, objective, and fast solution, reducing the challenges in the healthcare environment. Method This work integrates the Glowworm Optimization with Extreme Learning Machine Networks (GO‐ELMN) model to enhance the efficiency of ASD prediction. During the analysis, ASD screening data for children are collected and processed frequently to obtain behavioral, demographic, and medical features. The extracted features are processed by an extraction learning technique, in which the network hyperparameters are optimized using the glowworm optimization algorithm. The optimized classifier recognizes children's behavior by addressing the issues of limited and imbalanced data. Findings The efficiency of the system is evaluated using experimental results, in which the system ensures high accuracy and convergence speed. Conclusion The ASD detection model provides an interpretable, fast, and reliable solution that is effectively utilized in the pediatric healthcare domain.
Govindarajan et al. (Sun,) studied this question.