Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disease characterised by restricted and repetitive behaviours, as well as difficulty in social communication and interaction, in children. The clinical diagnosis of ASD is reached by behavioural screening, which delays early intervention. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method for analysing the brain's electrical activity that has proven useful in the diagnosis of several neurological illnesses. Pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) were used to extract features from the spectral profiles of the EEG dataset and classify patients into mild, moderate, and severe patients, as well as age-matched control subjects. Accordingly, the primary goal of this study is to use the pre-trained CNNs as classifiers in order to reap the benefits of transfer learning, and the secondary goal is to propose a hybrid model by employing decision tree (DT), K nearest neighbour (KNN), and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) machine learning classification techniques to categorise the features of the pre-trained CNN networks into mild, moderate, severe, and normal categories. The results show that using SqueezeNet for transfer learning improves classification accuracy to 85.5%, and that using SqueezeNet for hybrid models improves classification accuracy to 87.8% using SVM. Therefore, a hybrid model based on the combination of SqueezeNet and SVM might be utilised to automatically diagnose ASD based on the individual's EEG data.
INDEX TERMS Autism, EEG, deep learning, transfer learning, convolutional neural networks, machine learningI. INTRODUCTION A UTISM spectrum disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopmental illnesses characterized by markedly aberrant social interaction, impaired communication and language skills, and narrow interests [1]. Symptoms occur throughout childhood or infancy and are usually followed by a continuous course with no recovery from an illness [2]. Symptoms appear after the age of six months, become established by the age of two or three years old, and remain into adulthood, but with less severity [3], [4]. The 'spectrum' in ASD is for indicating that autistic individuals can have a multitude of symptoms, such as difficulties in motor movement abilities, limited attention spans, and sleep and gastrointestinal disturbances [2]. These are some prevalent characteristics of children with autism in which frequently, autistic children have communication difficulties, like refusing to engage in conversation, being unable to use appropriate language, repeating what they hear, and having a low linguistic understanding [5], [6]. However, some experience sensory disturbances, as well. These disturbances might be auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory, vestibular, or proprioceptive. Additionally, they avoid social interaction, as they prefer to be alone, the majority