Prediction of obesity levels based on physical activity and eating habits with a machine learning model integrated with explainable artificial intelligence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: This study aims to build a machine learning (ML) prediction model integrated with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to categorize obesity levels from physical activity and dietary patterns. The inclusion of XAI methodologies facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the risk factors influencing the model predictions and thus increases transparency in the identification of obesity risk factors. Methods: Six ML models were used: Bernoulli Naive Bayes, CatBoost, Decision Tree, Extra Trees Classifier, Histogram-based Gradient Boosting and Support Vector Machine. For each model, hyperparameters were tuned by random search methodology and model effectiveness was evaluated by repeated holdout testing. SHAP (SHapley Additive Annotations) and LIME (Local Interpretable Model Independent Annotations) interpretability methods were used to generate local and global feature importance measures. Results: The CatBoost model exhibited the highest overall performance and achieved superior results in accuracy, precision, F1 score and AUC metrics. Nonetheless, other models such as Decision Tree and Histogram-based Gradient Boosting also yielded strong and competitive results. The results also highlighted age, weight, height and specific food patterns as key predictors of obesity. In terms of interpretability, LIME showed superior in fidelity, whereas SHAP showed improved sparsity and consistency across models, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of trait importance. Conclusion: This research demonstrates that ML algorithms, when integrated with XAI technologies, can accurately predict obesity levels and explain important contributing risk factors. The use of SHAP and LIME increases model transparency, facilitating the identification of specific lifestyle patterns linked to obesity risk. These findings help to formulate more precise intervention techniques guided by a reliable and understandable predictive framework.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".