An Approach for Severity Prediction of Autism Using Machine Learning

Effective early diagnosis of autism can have a significant impact on its intervention and treatment. In this paper, an approach is proposed for comprehensively considering genetic factors and environmental factors to predict the severity of autism. According to the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS), a sample set was collected from the autism clinic and a predictive model based on a stacked sparse autoencoder combined with a softmax classifier was constructed. We compared the proposed model with decision trees and support vector machines. Experiments show that the proposed model has a highest accuracy in predicting the severity of autism. Our method can help patients predict their condition and assist doctors in accurate diagnosis.