Federated Anomaly Detection for Early-Stage Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders using Serious Game Data

Abstract

Early identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is considered critical for effective intervention to mitigate emotional, financial and societal burdens. Although ASD belongs to a group of neurodevelopmental disabilities that are not curable, researchers agree that targeted interventions during childhood can drastically improve the overall well-being of individuals. However, conventional ASD detection methods such as screening tests, are often costly and time-consuming. This study presents a novel semi-supervised approach for ASD detection using AutoEncoder-based Machine Learning (ML) methods due to the challenge of obtaining ground truth labels for the associated task. Our approach utilizes data collected manually through a serious game specifically designed for this purpose. Since the sensitive data collected by the gamified application are susceptible to privacy leakage, we developed a Federated Learning (FL) framework that can enhance user privacy without compromising the overall performance of the ML models. The framework is further enhanced with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) during model aggregation to minimize the possibility of inference attacks and client selection mechanisms as well as state-of-the-art aggregators to improve the model's predictive accuracy. Our results demonstrate that semi-supervised FL can effectively predict an ASD risk indicator for each case while simultaneously addressing privacy concerns.