Designing a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is a complex task and requires expert knowledge to optimize the performance and network architecture. In this paper, a novel data-driven approach is proposed to determine the architecture of CNN models. The proposed Autonomous Convolutional Neural Networks (AutoCNNThe executable code and original numerical results can be downloaded from (https://tinyurl.com/AutoCNN)) algorithm introduces data driven strategies for addition of new convolutional layers, pruning of redundant filters and training cycle optimization. AutoCNN is evaluated using MNIST, MNIST-rot-back-image, Fashion MNIST and the ADHD200 datasets to measure the performance on small datasets with varied feature distributions. The results indicate that AutoCNN optimizes the CNN network architecture and helps maximise the classification performance. The data-driven network determination approach introduced in this paper was found to not only provides competitive performance similar to existing evolutionary computation based network determination algorithms in literature, but was found to be an effective optimization tool to improve the performance of existing CNN architectures. Further, the AutoCNN was found to highly immune to noise in the dataset and has proven to be effective method to transfer knowledge between related datasets. Therefore, the AutoCNN is a highly versatile CNN architecture determination tool that has a wide range of applications in the field of autonomous driving, medical image analysis, image enhancement, camera based security monitoring and image based fault detection

Analysis of resting state - functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI) data has been a challenging problem due to a high homogeneity, large intra-class variability, limited samples and difference in acquisition technologies/techniques. These issues are predominant in the case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In this paper, we propose a new Deep Transformation Method (DTM) that extracts the discriminant latent feature space from rsfMRI and projects it in the subsequent layer for classification of rs-fMRI data. The hidden transformation layer in DTM projects the original rs-fMRI data into a new space using the learning policy and extracts the spatio-temporal correlations of the functional activities as a latent feature space. The subsequent convolution and decision layers transform the latent feature space into high-level features and provide accurate classification. The performance of DTM has been evaluated using the ADHD200 rs-fMRI benchmark data with crossvalidation. The results show that the proposed DTM achieves a mean classification accuracy of 70.36% and an improvement of 8.25% on the state of the art methodologies was observed. The improvement is due to concurrent analysis of the spatio-temporal correlations between the different regions of the brain and can be easily extended to study other cognitive disorders using rs-fMRI. Further, brain network analysis has been studied to identify the difference in functional activities and the corresponding regions behind cognitive symptoms in ADHD.