Are Machine Learning Algorithms More Accurate in Predicting Vegetable and Fruit Consumption Than Traditional Statistical Models? An Exploratory Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) algorithms may help better understand the complex interactions among factors that influence dietary choices and behaviors. The aim of this study was to explore whether ML algorithms are more accurate than traditional statistical models in predicting vegetable and fruit (VF) consumption. A large array of features (2,452 features from 525 variables) encompassing individual and environmental information related to dietary habits and food choices in a sample of 1,147 French-speaking adult men and women was used for the purpose of this study. Adequate VF consumption, which was defined as 5 servings/d or more, was measured by averaging data from three web-based 24 h recalls and used as the outcome to predict. Nine classification ML algorithms were compared to two traditional statistical predictive models, logistic regression and penalized regression (Lasso). The performance of the predictive ML algorithms was tested after the implementation of adjustments, including normalizing the data, as well as in a series of sensitivity analyses such as using VF consumption obtained from a web-based food frequency questionnaire (wFFQ) and applying a feature selection algorithm in an attempt to reduce overfitting. Logistic regression and Lasso predicted adequate VF consumption with an accuracy of 0.64 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.58-0.70) and 0.64 (95%CI: 0.60-0.68) respectively. Among the ML algorithms tested, the most accurate algorithms to predict adequate VF consumption were the support vector machine (SVM) with either a radial basis kernel or a sigmoid kernel, both with an accuracy of 0.65 (95%CI: 0.59-0.71). The least accurate ML algorithm was the SVM with a linear kernel with an accuracy of 0.55 (95%CI: 0.49-0.61). Using dietary intake data from the wFFQ and applying a feature selection algorithm had little to no impact on the performance of the algorithms. In summary, ML algorithms and traditional statistical models predicted adequate VF consumption with similar accuracies among adults. These results suggest that additional research is needed to explore further the true potential of ML in predicting dietary behaviours that are determined by complex interactions among several individual, social and environmental factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".