Deep learning-based feature selection and prediction system for autism spectrum disorder using a hybrid meta-heuristics approach

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complicated neurodevelopment disorder that is becoming more common day by day around the world. The literature that uses machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches gained interest due to their ability to increase the accuracy of diagnosing disorders and reduce the physician's workload. These artificial intelligence-based applications can learn and detect patterns automatically through the collection of data. ML approaches are used in various applications where the traditional algorithms have failed to obtain better results. The major advantage of the ML algorithm is its ability to produce consistent and better performance predictions with the help of non-linear and complex relationships among the features. In this paper, deep learning with a meta-heuristic (MH) approach is proposed to perform the feature extraction and feature selection processes. The proposed feature selection phase has two sub-phases, such as DL-based feature extraction and MH-based feature selection. The effective convolutional neural network (CNN) model is implemented to extract the core features that will learn the relevant data representation in a lower-dimensional space. The hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm called Seagull-Elephant Herding Optimization Algorithm (SEHOA) is used to select the most relevant and important features from the CNN extracted features. Autism disorder patients are identified using long-term short-term memory as a classifier. This will detect the ASD using the fMRI image dataset ABIDE (Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange) and obtain promising results. There are five evaluation metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and area under the curve (AUC) used. The validated results show that the proposed model performed better, with an accuracy of 98.6%.