DCN variations for autism diagnosis

Autism is correlated with DNA copy number variations (DCV). We used a statistical approach to analyze 75Mb of DNA samples of 71 autistic children and 71 typically developing children to prove the existence of significant differences between the two groups in their copy number burden. We applied unsupervised Fuzzy k-means clustering analysis first locally to identify the most distinctive locations, then globally to synthesize a collection of CNVs that have a strong power of segregating AU group from TD. We defined a collection of 13 CNVs with a total length < 100kb that classifies 121 individuals out of 142 correctly.