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Applying machine learning to identify autistic adults using imitation: An exploratory study

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posted on 2017-09-04, 13:48 authored by Baihua LiBaihua Li, Arjun Sharma, James Meng, Senthil Purushwalkam, Emma Gowen
Autism spectrum condition (ASC) is primarily diagnosed by behavioural symptoms including social, sensory and motor aspects. Although stereotyped, repetitive motor movements are considered during diagnosis, quantitative measures that identify kinematic characteristics in the movement patterns of autistic individuals are poorly studied, preventing advances in understanding the aetiology of motor impairment, or whether a wider range of motor characteristics could be used for diagnosis. The aim of this study was to investigate whether data-driven machine learning based methods could be used to address some fundamental problems with regard to identifying discriminative test conditions and kinematic parameters to classify between ASC and neurotypical controls. Data was based on a previous task where 16 ASC participants and 14 age, IQ matched controls observed then imitated a series of hand movements. 40 kinematic parameters extracted from eight imitation conditions were analysed using machine learning based methods. Two optimal imitation conditions and nine most significant kinematic parameters were identified and compared with some standard attribute evaluators. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply machine learning to kinematic movement parameters measured during imitation of hand movements to investigate the identification of ASC. Although based on a small sample, the work demonstrates the feasibility of applying machine learning methods to analyse high-dimensional data and suggest the potential of machine learning for identifying kinematic biomarkers that could contribute to the diagnostic classification of autism.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Published in

PLoS ONE

Citation

Li, B. ...et al., 2017. Applying machine learning to identify autistic adults using imitation: An exploratory study. PLoS ONE, 12(8): e0182652.

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-07-22

Publication date

2017

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by PLoS under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

1932-6203

Language

  • en

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