People make subjective judgments about the healthiness of different foods every day, and these judgments in turn influence their food choices and health outcomes. Despite the importance of such judgments, there are few quantitative theories about their psychological underpinnings. This article introduces a novel computational approach that can approximate people’s knowledge representations for thousands of common foods. We used these representations to predict how both lay decision-makers (the general population) and experts judge the healthiness of individual foods. We also applied our method to predict the impact of behavioral interventions, such as the provision of front-of-pack nutrient and calorie information. Across multiple studies with data from 846 adults, our models achieved very high accuracy rates ( r 2 = .65–.77) and significantly outperformed competing models based on factual nutritional content. These results illustrate how new computational methods applied to established psychological theory can be used to better predict, understand, and influence health behavior.
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Forewarning Postprandial Hyperglycemia with Interpretations using Machine Learning
Postprandial hyperglycemia (PPHG) is detrimental to health and increases risk of cardiovascular diseases, reduced eyesight, and life-threatening conditions like cancer. Detecting PPHG events before they occur can potentially help with providing early interventions. Prior research suggests that PPHG events can be predicted based on information about diet. However, such computational approaches (1) are data hungry requiring significant amounts of data for algorithm training; and (2) work as a black-box and lack interpretability, thus limiting the adoption of these technologies for use in clinical interventions. Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose, DietNudge 1 , a machine learning based framework that integrates multi-modal data about diet, insulin, and blood glucose to predict PPHG events before they occur. Using data from patients with diabetes, we demonstrate that our model can predict PPHG events with up to 90% classification accuracy and an average F1 score of 0.93. The proposed decision-tree-based approach also identifies modifiable factors that contribute to an impending PPHG event while providing personalized thresholds to prevent such events. Our results suggest that we can develop simple, yet effective, computational algorithms that can be used as preventative mechanisms for diabetes and obesity management.
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- PAR ID:
- 10389471
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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