Explainable AI Highlights the Most Relevant Gait Features for Neurodegenerative Disease Classification

Gait analysis is a valuable tool for aiding in the diagnosis of neurological diseases, providing objective measurements of human gait kinematics and kinetics. These data enable the quantitative estimation of movement abnormalities, which helps to diagnose disorders and assess their severity. In this regard, machine learning techniques and explainability methods offer an opportunity to enhance anomaly detection in gait measurements and support a more objective assessment of neurodegenerative disease, providing insights into the most relevant gait parameters used for disease identification. This study employs several classifiers and explainability methods to analyze gait data from a public dataset composed of patients affected by degenerative neurological diseases and healthy controls. The work investigates the relevance of spatial, temporal, and kinematic gait parameters in distinguishing such diseases. The findings are consistent among the classifiers employed and in agreement with known clinical findings about the major gait impairments for each disease. This work promotes the use of data-driven assessments in clinical settings, helping reduce subjectivity in gait evaluation and enabling broader deployment in healthcare environments.