Predicting risk of obesity and meal planning to reduce the obese in adulthood using artificial intelligence

An unhealthy diet or excessive amount of food intake creates obesity issues in human beings that further may cause several diseases such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), Cardiovascular disease, Diabetes, Cancers, etc. Obesity is a major risk factor for PCOS, which is a common disease in women and is significantly correlated with weight gain.

This study is providing a one-step solution for predicting the risk of obesity using different Machine Learning (ML) algorithms such as Gradient Boosting (GB), Bagging meta-estimator (BME), XG Boost (XGB), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and K Nearest Neighbour (KNN). A dataset is collected from the UCI ML repository having features of physical description and eating habits of individuals to train the proposed model.

The model has been experimented with different training and testing data ratios such as (90:10, 80:20, 70:30,60:40). At a data ratio of 90:10, the GB classifier achieved the highest accuracy i.e., 98.11%. Further, at the 80:20 ratio, the GB and XGB provide the same result i.e., 97.87%. For the 70:30 data ratio, XGB achieves the highest accuracy i.e., 97.79%. Further, the Nearest Neighbour (NN) learning method is applied to meal planning to overcome obesity.

This method predicts the meal which includes breakfast, morning snacks, lunch, evening snacks, and dinner for the individual as per caloric and macronutrient requirements. The proposed research work can be used by practitioners to check obesity levels and to suggest meals to reduce the obese in adulthood.