Children with autism spectrum disorder produce more ambiguous and less socially meaningful facial expressions: an experimental study using random forest classifiers.

Background: Computer vision combined with human annotation could offer a novel method for exploring facial expression (FE) dynamics in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Methods: We recruited 157 children with typical development (TD) and 36 children with ASD in Paris and Nice to perform two experimental tasks to produce FEs with emotional valence. FEs were explored by judging ratings and by random forest (RF) classifiers.