3D Gait-Based Autism Classification Using Attention-Enhanced Deep Learning with Cross-Fold Statistical Stability Analysis
Md Nadim Mahamood, Md Arif Shahriar, Md Parvej Sikder, Md Rasul Islam, Md Shafi Ud Doula, Md Ashraful Alam, Kamrul Hasan
Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition whose early diagnosis remains challenging because conventional clinical assessments are often subjective, time-consuming, and require expert evaluation. Gait provides a promising non-invasive behavioral biomarker for auto- mated ASD screening; however, existing studies have primarily relied on single-dataset evaluations, convolutional architectures, and descriptive summaries of cross-validation performance without formally assessing fold-to-fold stability. This study addresses these gaps with an attention-enhanced Transformer framework for ASD classification, evaluated on two structurally different 3D gait feature representations: precomputed statistical gait descriptors and raw biomechanical ground-reaction- force measurements. Under five-fold cross-validation, the proposed framework achieved 99.00% accuracy, 99.02% precision, 99.00% recall, 99.00% F1-score, and 99.00% specificity on the public Kinect-based benchmark, exceeding the performance of the compared state-of-the-art methods. On the independent private force-plate dataset, it achieved mean values of 95.00% accuracy, 93.81% precision, 96.67% recall, 95.13% F1-score, and 93.33% specificity.