Identifying dyslexia in school pupils from eye movement and demographic data using artificial intelligence

Plos One. 2023. Vol. 18. No. 11. P. .

Shalileh S., Ignatov D. I., Lopukhina A., Dragoy O.

This paper represents our research results in the pursuit of the following objectives: (i) to introduce a novel multi-sources data set to tackle the shortcomings of the previous data sets, (ii) to propose a robust artificial intelligence-based solution to identify dyslexia in pri- mary school pupils, (iii) to investigate our psycholinguistic knowledge by studying the impor- tance of the features in identifying dyslexia by our best AI model. In order to achieve the first objective, we collected and annotated a new set of eye-movement-during-reading data. Fur- thermore, we collected demographic data, including the measure of non-verbal intelligence, to form our three data sources. Our data set is the largest eye-movement data set globally. Unlike the previously introduced binary-class data sets, it contains (A) three class labels and (B) reading speed. Concerning the second objective, we formulated the task of dyslexia pre- diction as regression and classification problems and scrutinized the performance of 12 classifications and eight regressions approaches. We exploited the Bayesian optimization method to fine-tune the hyperparameters of the models: and reported the average and the standard deviation of our evaluation metrics in a stratified ten-fold cross-validation. Our studies showed that multi-layer perceptron, random forest, gradient boosting, and k-nearest neighbor form the group having the most acceptable results. Moreover, we showed that although separately using each data source did not lead to accurate results, their combina- tion led to a reliable solution. We also determined the importance of the features of our best classifier: our findings showed that the IQ, gender, and age are the top three important fea- tures; we also showed that fixation along the y-axis is more important than other fixation data.

Keywords: 20th European Conference on Eye Movements, Artificial intelligence (AI), Classification, Dyslexia detection