Date of Award

Summer 8-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computational and Data Sciences

First Advisor

Erik Linstead

Second Advisor

Elia Eiroa Lledo

Third Advisor

Dennis Dixon

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by difficulties in areas of social communication, reciprocal social interaction, restricted or repetitive patterns of behavior and interests, and cognitive or significant delays in early language development. Although we are seeing consistent research being done on understanding the genetic and biological aspects of ASD, diagnosing ASD patients is solely based on behavioral symptoms.

In this thesis, we leverage unsupervised machine learning techniques to better understand ASD patients and the challenging behaviors they present. We used Doc2Vec to create neural word embedding vectors on the clinical notes presented and K-means clustering to group the patients based on similarities in the notes. The clusters will give us greater insight into the examinations done by clinicians in ABA therapy, the challenging behaviors presented, and the similarities between patients in the cluster.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Available for download on Thursday, August 31, 2023

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