3D Gait-Based Autism Classification Using Attention-Enhanced Deep Learning with Cross-Fold Statistical Stability Analysis

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.