<![CDATA[Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental condition characterized by persistent social-communication impairments and restricted or repetitive behaviors. While clinical assessment remains the diagnostic gold standard, the demand for objective and scalable screening tools has motivated EEG-based automated classification. However, under controlled experimental settings, the relative contributions of preprocessing choices and deep learning architecture selection to ASD detection performance remain insufficiently quantified. This study systematically benchmarks artifact-aware preprocessing and model architecture by comparing InceptionTime and XceptionTime across four end-to-end processing schemes that isolate the effects of independent component analysis (ICA) and classifier design under identical segmentation and evaluation protocols. A public King Abdulaziz University EEG dataset comprising 16 subjects (8 ASD, 8 controls) was used. Signals were bandpass-filtered using a fourth-order Butterworth filter (0.5–45 Hz), optionally denoised via ICA, and segmented into 4-s windows with 50% overlap. Models were evaluated using 8-fold subject-wise cross-validation. Performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score, and statistical significance was tested with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The Butterworth+ICA+InceptionTime pipeline achieved the best results, with a mean accuracy of 0.9886 ± 0.0046 and an F1-score of 0.9879 ± 0.0049. ICA inclusion and architecture choice yielded significant improvements in accuracy ( for both, ). These findings indicate that structured artifact suppression and multi-scale temporal modeling jointly enhance EEG-based ASD classification, supporting their use in robust clinically oriented screening systems.]]>
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