Investigating One-Class Classifiers to Diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease from Handwriting

The analysis of handwriting and drawing has been adopted since the early studies to help diagnose neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Departing from the current state-of-the-art methods that approach the problem of discriminating between healthy subjects and patients by using two- or multi-class classifiers, we propose to adopt one-class classifier models, as they require only data by healthy subjects to build the classifier, thus avoiding to collect patient data, as requested by competing techniques. In this framework, we evaluated the performance of three models of one-class classifiers, namely the Negative Selection Algorithm, the Isolation Forest and the One-Class Support Vector Machine, on the DARWIN dataset, which includes 174 subjects performing 25 handwriting/drawing tasks. The comparison with the state-of-the-art shows that the methods achieve state-of-the-art performance, and therefore may represent a viable alternative to the dominant approach.