Fig. 2.

Monte-Carlo Cross-Validation analysis of the top 14 miRNAs. a The robustness of the 14 miRNA biomarkers was evaluated in stepwise fashion by determining their ability to correctly classify subjects using 100 iterations of a multivariate PLS-DA with 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, and 14 miRNAs included, and masking of 1/3 of the subjects during the training phase. This revealed an overall ROC-AUC of 0.92 and mis-classification of three ASD and four Control subjects. b Shows the classification of subjects plotted by predicted class probabilities from the MCCV (x axis), with incorrectly classified subjects identified by ID number. The y axis units are arbitrary. c Whisker box plots (showing median and inter-quartile range) of the four most robustly changed miRNAs according to the Mann-Whitney test