Unlocking the Potential of Autism Detection: Integrating Traditional Feature Selection and Machine Learning Techniques

The diagnostic process for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) typically involves time-consuming assessments conducted by specialized physicians. To improve the efficiency of ASD screening, intelligent solutions based              on machine learning have been proposed in the literature. However, many existing ML models lack the incorporation of medical tests and demographic features, which could potentially enhance their detection capabilities by considering affected features through traditional feature selection approaches. This study aims to address the aforementioned limitation by utilizing a real dataset containing 45 features and 983 patients. To achieve this goal, a two-phase methodology is employed. The first phase involves data preparation, including handling missing data through model-based imputation, normalizing the dataset using the Min-Max method, and selecting relevant features using traditional feature selection approaches based on affected features. In the second phase, seven ML classification techniques recommended by the literature, including Decision Trees (DT), Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting (