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

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Li B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5558936 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundEmotional state in everyday life is an essential indicator of health and well-being. However, daily assessment of emotional states largely depends on active self-reports, which are often inconvenient and prone to incomplete information. Automated detection of emotional states and transitions on a daily basis could be an effective solution to this problem. However, the relationship between emotional transitions and everyday context remains to be unexplored.ObjectiveThis study aims to explore the relationship between contextual information and emotional transitions and states to evaluate the feasibility of detecting emotional transitions and states from daily contextual information using machine learning (ML) techniques.MethodsThis study was conducted on the data of 18 individuals from a publicly available data set called ExtraSensory. Contextual and sensor data were collected using smartphone and smartwatch sensors in a free-living condition, where the number of days for each person varied from 3 to 9. Sensors included an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a compass, location services, a microphone, a phone state indicator, light, temperature, and a barometer. The users self-reported approximately 49 discrete emotions at different intervals via a smartphone app throughout the data collection period. We mapped the 49 reported discrete emotions to the 3 dimensions of the pleasure, arousal, and dominance model and considered 6 emotional states: discordant, pleased, dissuaded, aroused, submissive, and dominant. We built general and personalized models for detecting emotional transitions and states every 5 min. The transition detection problem is a binary classification problem that detects whether a person's emotional state has changed over time, whereas state detection is a multiclass classification problem. In both cases, a wide range of supervised ML algorithms were leveraged, in addition to data preprocessing, feature selection, and data imbalance handling techniques. Finally, an assessment was conducted to shed light on the association between everyday context and emotional states.ResultsThis study obtained promising results for emotional state and transition detection. The best area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve for emotional state detection reached 60.55% in the general models and an average of 96.33% across personalized models. Despite the highly imbalanced data, the best AUROC curve for emotional transition detection reached 90.5% in the general models and an average of 88.73% across personalized models. In general, feature analyses show that spatiotemporal context, phone state, and motion-related information are the most informative factors for emotional state and transition detection. Our assessment showed that lifestyle has an impact on the predictability of emotion.ConclusionsOur results demonstrate a strong association of daily context with emotional states and transitions as well as the feasibility of detecting emotional states and transitions using data from smartphone and smartwatch sensors.

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

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