AUTHOR=Afzal Namra , Iqbal Javaid , Waris Asim , Khan Muhammad Jawad , Hazzazi Fawwaz , Ali Hasnain , Ijaz Muhammad Adeel , Gilani Syed Omer 

TITLE=CRISP: a correlation-filtered recursive feature elimination and integration of SMOTE pipeline for gait-based Parkinson’s disease screening

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 19 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncom.2025.1660963

DOI=10.3389/fncom.2025.1660963

ISSN=1662-5188

ABSTRACT=IntroductionParkinson’s disease (PD) is the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disorder, with subtle gait changes such as reduced vertical ground-reaction forces (VGRF) often preceding motor symptoms. These gait abnormalities, measurable via wearable VGRF sensors, offer a non-invasive means for early PD detection. However, current computational approaches often suffer from redundant features and class imbalance, limiting both accuracy and generalizability.MethodsWe propose CRISP (Correlation-filtered Recursive Feature Elimination and Integration of SMOTE Pipeline for Gait-Based Parkinson’s Disease Screening), a lightweight multistage framework that sequentially applies correlation-based feature pruning, recursive feature elimination (RFE), and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) based class balancing. To ensure clinically meaningful evaluation, a novel subject-wise protocol was also introduced that assigns one prediction per individual enhancing patient-level variability capture and better aligning with diagnostic workflows. Using 306 VGRF recordings (93 PD, 76 controls), five classifiers, i.e., k-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Gradient boosting (GB), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) were evaluated for both binary PD detection and multiclass severity grading.ResultsCRISP consistently improved performance across all models under 5-fold cross-validation. XGBoost achieved the highest performance, increasing subject-wise PD detection accuracy from 96.1 ± 0.8% to 98.3 ± 0.8%, and severity grading accuracy from 96.2 ± 0.7% to 99.3 ± 0.5%.ConclusionCRISP is the first VGRF-based pipeline to combine correlation-filtered feature pruning, recursive feature elimination, and SMOTE to enhance PD detection performance, while also introducing a subject-wise evaluation protocol that captures patient-level variability for truly personalized diagnostics. These twin novelties deliver clinically significant gains and lay the foundation for real-time, on-device PD detection and severity monitoring.