Body fat percentage prediction using intelligent hybrid approaches

Applications of Artificial Intelligence to Obesity Research: Scoping Review of Methodologies

BACKGROUND

Obesity is a leading cause of preventable death worldwide. Artificial intelligence (AI), characterized by machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), has become an indispensable tool in obesity research.

OBJECTIVE

This scoping review aimed to provide researchers and practitioners with an overview of the AI applications to obesity research, familiarize them with popular ML and DL models, and facilitate the adoption of AI applications.

METHODS

We conducted a scoping review in PubMed and Web of Science on the applications of AI to measure, predict, and treat obesity. We summarized and categorized the AI methodologies used in the hope of identifying synergies, patterns, and trends to inform future investigations. We also provided a high-level, beginner-friendly introduction to the core methodologies to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of various AI techniques.

RESULTS

We identified 46 studies that used diverse ML and DL models to assess obesity-related outcomes. The studies found AI models helpful in detecting clinically meaningful patterns of obesity or relationships between specific covariates and weight outcomes. The majority (18/22, 82%) of the studies comparing AI models with conventional statistical approaches found that the AI models achieved higher prediction accuracy on test data. Some (5/46, 11%) of the studies comparing the performances of different AI models revealed mixed results, indicating the high contingency of model performance on the data set and task it was applied to. An accelerating trend of adopting state-of-the-art DL models over standard ML models was observed to address challenging computer vision and natural language processing tasks. We concisely introduced the popular ML and DL models and summarized their specific applications in the studies included in the review.

CONCLUSIONS

This study reviewed AI-related methodologies adopted in the obesity literature, particularly ML and DL models applied to tabular, image, and text data. The review also discussed emerging trends such as multimodal or multitask AI models, synthetic data generation, and human-in-the-loop that may witness increasing applications in obesity research.

A hybrid feature selection algorithm using simplified swarm optimization for body fat prediction

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Obesity is one of the chronic diseases that seriously threaten people's health outcomes globally. Since the prevalence of obesity is increasing among people of all ages, measuring the body fat percentages is vital before treatment. However, the body fat percentage cannot be accurately measured by weighing. While many devices are commonly used to measure the body fat percentage, these devices are expensive and depend on complex instruments. Therefore, more practical and cost-effective solutions are desired to measure body fat accurately. This study presents a hybrid feature selection method based on a VIKOR-based multi-filter ensemble technique (VMFET) and an improved simplified swarm optimization (iSSO) to predict the body fat percentage with low prediction error.

METHODS

The study followed a two-phase process. First, VMFET was used to aggregate the statistical outcomesof individual filters to filter the most informative features from the original dataset. Then, the selected features are applied to the next phase. Second, iSSO was tailored with a biased random initialization scheme, effect-based feature pruning scheme, and multiple linear regression as a wrapper method to improve the prediction performance and select the optimal feature subset.

STUDIES RESULTS

Extensive experiments were performed using nine datasets to verify the performance of the proposed method empirically, and the corresponding results were compared with up-to-date studies.

CONCLUSION

The statistical results demonstrated that the proposed method offers a promising and effective tool for predicting body fat.

SIGNIFICANCE

The hybrid feature selection model can enhance prediction accuracy and lower prediction error.

Hybrid Machine Learning Model for Body Fat Percentage Prediction Based on Support Vector Regression and Emotional Artificial Neural Networks

Obesity or excessive body fat causes multiple health problems and diseases. However, obesity treatment and control need an accurate determination of body fat percentage (BFP). The existing methods for BFP estimation require several procedures, which reduces their cost-effectivity and generalization. Therefore, developing cost-effective models for BFP estimation is vital for obesity treatment. Machine learning models, particularly hybrid models, have a strong ability to analyze challenging data and perform predictions by combining different characteristics of the models. This study proposed a hybrid machine learning model based on support vector regression and emotional artificial neural networks (SVR-EANNs) for accurate recent BFP prediction using a primary BFP dataset. SVR was applied as a consistent attribute selection model on seven properties and measurements, using the left-out sensitivity analysis, and the regression ability of the EANN was considered in the prediction phase. The proposed model was compared to seven benchmark machine learning models. The obtained results show that the proposed hybrid model (SVR-EANN) outperformed other machine learning models by achieving superior results in the three considered evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the proposed model suggested that abdominal circumference is a significant factor in BFP prediction, while age has a minor effect.

Using an improved relative error support vector machine for body fat prediction

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

The term 'obesity' refers to excessive body fat, and it is a chronic disease associated with various complications. Although a range of techniques for body fat estimation have been developed to assess obesity, they are typically associated with high-cost tests requiring special equipment. Accurate prediction of the body fat percentage based on easily accessed body measurements is thus important for assessing obesity and its related diseases. This paper presents an improved relative error support vector machine approach to predict body fat in a cost-effective manner.

METHODS

Our proposed method introduces a bias error control term into its objective function to obtain an unbiased estimation. Feature selection is also utilised, by removing either redundant or irrelevant features without incurring much loss of information, to further improve the prediction accuracy. In addition, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test is used to validate if the performance of our proposed method is significantly better than other prediction models being compared.

RESULTS

Experimental results based on four evaluation metrics show that the proposed method is able to outperform other prediction models under comparison. Considering the characteristics of different features (e.g., body measurements), we show that applying feature selection can further improve the prediction performance. Statistical analysis carried out confirms that our proposed method has obtained significantly better results than other compared methods.

CONCLUSIONS

We have proposed a new approach to predict the body fat percentage effectively. This approach can provide a good reference for people to know their body fat percentage with easily accessed measurements. Statistical test results based on the Wilcoxon rank-sum test not only show that our proposed method has significantly better performance than other prediction models being compared, but also confirm the usefulness of incorporating feature selection into the proposed method.

Predicting human body composition using a modified adaptive genetic algorithm with a novel selection operator

Background

Changes to human body composition reflect changes in health status to some extent. It has been recognized that these changes occur earlier than diseases. This means that a reasonable prediction of body composition helps to improve model users’ health. To overcome the low accuracy and poor adaptability of existing human body composition prediction models and obtain higher efficiency, we proposed a novel method for predicting human body composition which uses a modified adaptive genetic algorithm (MAGA).

Methods

Firstly, since there are many parameters for a human body composition model, and these parameters are associated, we designed a new parameter selection approach by combining the improved RReliefF method with the mRMR method. Following this, selected parameters were used to establish a model that fits body composition. Secondly, in order to accurately calculate the weight of parameters in this model, we proposed a solution which used a modified adaptive genetic algorithm, taking advantage of both roulette and optimum reservation strategies. This solution also has an improved selection operator. Thirdly, taking the percentage of body fat (PBF) as an example of body composition, we conducted experiments to compare performance between our algorithm and other algorithms.

Results

Through our simulations, we demonstrated that the adaptability of the proposed model is 0.9921, the mean relative error is 0.05%, the mean square error is 1.3 and the correlation coefficient is 0.982. When compared with the indexes of other models, our model has the highest adaptability and the smallest error. Additionally, the suggested model, which has a training time of 28.58s and a running time of 2.84s, is faster than some models.

Conclusion

The PBF prediction model established by MAGA has high accuracy, stronger generalization ability and higher efficiency, which could provide a new method for human composition prediction.