The 10h IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems, Services and Technologies, DESSERT’2019
5-7 June, 2019, Leeds, United Kingdom
A Machine Learning Approach for Predicting
Weight Gain Risks in Young Adults
Balbir Singh
School of Computing, Creative Technologies and Engineering
Leeds Beckett UNiversity
Leeds, United Kingdom
B.Singh@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Abstract— Individuals developing signs of weight gain or
obesity are at a risk of developing serious illnesses such as type
2 diabetes, respiratory problems, coronary heart disease and
stroke. Physical activity and healthy eating can be a
fundamental component to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Therefore, detecting childhood obesity is of paramount
importance. This paper utilises the vast amount of data
available via the millennium cohort study. Various regression
methods and artificial neural network models have been
evaluated to predict the teenager BMI from earlier BMI values.
The results obtained are encouraging and a prediction accuracy
of over 90% has been achieved. Various issues relating to data
mining and prediction accuracy are discussed.
Keywords— Obesity, BMI, regression, machine-learning,
data-science, prediction, neural-networks.
I. INTRODUCTION
A report published by McKinsey Global Institute on
overcoming obesity highlighted some alarming facts [1]. The
report discusses that more than 2.1 billion people are
overweight or obese worldwide which amounts to almost 30%
of the global population. If the current trend continues, the
overweight and obese population is likely to increase to 41%
by 2030. The report also states that the cost of addressing
global obesity is $2.0 trillion which is comparable to the
impact of smoking or armed conflict, both costing $2.1 trillion
each. The report recommends that the behaviour change
interventions can be cost effective for the society by saving
money from the health care costs and increased productivity.
Such intervention could save around $1.2 billion for the
National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom alone.
The evidence suggests that the behavioural change
interventions to combat obesity need further investigation to
find workable solutions rather than waiting for a perfect
solution. In the United Kingdom, the data presented in Health
Survey for England reports that the percentage of obese
children between the age of 2 and 15 has increased
significantly since 1995 [2]. 16% of boys and 15% of girls in
this age group were classed as obese. 14% of both genders
were classed as overweight. This results in 30% of boys and
29% of girls being either overweight or obese. In 1995, 11%
of boys and 12% of girls of 2-15 years of age were obese.
However, [3] highlights that the prevalence of childhood
overweight seems to be plateauing worldwide. This review
included data from 467,294 children from nine countries
(Australia, China, England, France, Netherlands, New
Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and USA). Another survey
identified 52 obesity studies worldwide from 25 countries and
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Hissam Tawfik
School of Computing, Creative Technologies and Engineering
Leeds Beckett UNiversity
Leeds, United Kingdom
H.Tawfik@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
reported some stability in obesity [4]. Similar claims were
made by [5] and [6]. Some reports even suggest that childhood
obesity may well be declining as a cumulative result of
increased physical activity, television viewing decline and
reduction in sugary drink consumption [7]. However, [4] also
reported that this stability should be observed with caution
since previous stable phases were followed by further
increases in prevalence of obesity.
Health Survey England 2013 [8] also reported some
alarming facts about adult obesity. It was reported that 26% of
men and 24% of women were obese. 41% of men and 33% of
women were overweight. Looking at these combined figures
gives cause for concern since 67% of men and 57% of women
are above their normal weight for their height.
Childhood obesity is of great public concern as 22-90% of
the obese childhood population will continue to be obese as an
adult [9]. Obesity is strongly linked with other negative health
conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases,
cancers and even death [10, 11, 12, 13]. Considering all this,
it is obvious that there is a pressing need to identify individuals
at a risk of developing obesity as early as possible. The
purpose of this study is to carry out analysis and evaluation
using suitable machine learning algorithms to predict future
BMI values for young adults from early childhood data with a
high degree of accuracy.
II. RELATED WORK
A. Expert systems and AI in health
Long before the proliferation of machine learning
techniques, expert systems such as earlier artificial
intelligence have been in use for the analysis of medical scans
and detection of other medical abnormalities. As soon as it
became possible to digitize medical scans and store them in
computer memory, medical staff and computer scientists have
been proactive in building automated systems to analyse them.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, scanned medical images were
analysed using low level pixel processing (edge and line
detection) and mathematical modelling (fitting lines, circles
and ellipses) [14]. Systems of this kind have been described as
Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence or GOFAI [15].
Using computational intelligence, there have been numerous
other examples of automated disease diagnosis over the last
decades [16, 17, 18].
B. Machine Learning applications in health
A variety of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have
been employed in the prediction of medical diseases and
solve complex problems based on a set of known parameters.
ANNs relate to machine learning (ML) methods and are
utilised to correlate input to corresponding output data.
Several examples of application of ANNs in health and
wellbeing and engineering systems have been reported with
a varying degree of success. For example, ANNs have been
applied in various non-linear problem-solving scenarios
including robotic decision making, swarm intelligence,
aviation application and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in games
[19]. ANNs have also been used to identify diseases
associated with the brain activity such as Parkinson’s,
Schizophrenia, and Huntington’s disease from the CNV
response in electroencephalograph [20]. Multilayer
perceptron (MLP) and probabilistic neural network (PNN)
have been utilized for the prediction of osteoporosis with
bone densitometry [21]. Reference [22] evaluated a range of
machine learning algorithms to predict accurate amount of
medication dosage required for patients suffering from sickle
cell disease. Administering accurate amount of medication
based on patient’s condition is of paramount importance. A
range of machine learning techniques were investigated to
accurately predict the correct amount of medication required.
The algorithms investigated included Random Forests, Sup-
port Vector Machines and a few variants of Neural Networks.
It was reported that Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks
trained with Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm and Random
Forests provided the best results.
C. Machine Learning techniques for tackling obesity
Literature survey shows that only a limited number of
studies exist reporting machine learning to detect childhood
obesity. Because of the complex nature of the problem,
machine learning techniques provide much more robust
prediction accuracy rather than using simpler techniques such
as linear regression or other statistical methods [23].
Reference [24] applied machine learning techniques to data
collected from children before the age of 2 to predict future
obesity. In this study, they used data collected on children
prior to the second birthday using a clinical support system.
They reported an accuracy of 85%, sensitivity of 89%,
positive predictive value of 84% and negative predictive
value of 88% using the ID3 algorithm for decision trees
without pruning. The other algorithms tested were Naïve
Bayes, Random Trees, Random Forests, C4.5 decision trees
with pruning and Bayes Net. Several other studies also
reported the use of machine learning algorithms used for
predicting obesity. Reference [25] suggested that Radial
Basis ANNs (RBANNs) are far more efficient than classical
Back Propagation ANNs (BPANNs) but very large datasets
would be required to train such systems. This study discussed
algorithms only; results were not reported. Reference [26]
discussed several algorithms for predicting childhood
obesity. They recommended the suitability of ANNs, Naïve
Bayes and Decision Trees. Several optimisation techniques
have also been applied to achieve better prediction accuracy.
For example, Genetic Algorithms were employed by [27] to
improve the prediction accuracy to 92%. However, it must be
noted that they used a very small sample size of 12 subjects.
A comprehensive study, possibly the best one identified so
far, was carried out by [28] to apply machine learning
techniques to predict childhood obesity. They compared the
performance metrics of several machine learning prediction
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algorithms. They compared logistic regression with six data
mining techniques: Decision Trees, Association Rules,
Neural Networks, Naïve Bayes, Bayesian Networks and
Support Vector Ma-chines. They considered prediction
sensitivity the most important element in predict-ing obesity
for their study. The highest reported sensitivity for their work
was 62% in the case of Naïve Bayes and Bayesian Networks.
This research group used a limited range of demographics
(gender) and biometrics (weight, height and BMI) and the
subjects were 2 year old children. It is envisaged that the
prediction accuracy can be further improved by using a
different set of parameters, using big data and other machine
learning techniques such as deep learning to handle big data.
Reference [29] applied machine learning techniques to
measure and monitor physical activity in children. They
evaluated Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs), Support Vector
Machines, Decision Trees, Naïve Bayes and K=3 Nearest
Neighbour algorithms. It was reported that MLPs
outperformed all the other algorithms yielding an overall
accuracy of 96%, sensitivity of 95% and specificity of 99%.
It should be noted that the sample size in this case was also
relatively small (22 participants). The investigation of Deep
Learning techniques for future work was proposed.
III. METHODS
A. Data
The data for this study are used from the Millennium
Cohort Study (MCS). The MCS followed every child born in
year 2000 and 2001. A vast amount of data were collected
including weight and height. Six sweeps were conducted at
various steps of each child’s growth as shown in Table I.
TABLE I. MILLENNIUM COHORT STUDY PROFILES
Millennium Cohort Study Profiles
MCS1 MCS2 MCS3 MCS4 MCS5 MCS6
9 months 3 years 5 years 7 years 11 years 14 years
Data mining involved combining data samples from each
of the sweeps and discarding samples containing outliers. The
study was designed to predict the future value for the BMI of
a given sample based on earlier BMI values. Hence, it made
sense to use MCS1 through MCS5 as inputs and MCS6 as
target. It was, however, discovered that the data contained in
MCS1 were not very meaningful since the BMI of a 9-month
old baby was not of much significance. Therefore, only
MCS2 through MCS5 were used as inputs to result in a
meaningful prediction. The datasets are available in to
researchers in SPSS, STATA and TAB formats.
B. Methodology and results
1) Multivariate linear regression
The study involved the use of multivariate linear
regression and a number of other algorithms to carry out a
comparative analysis of prediction accuracies. The data were
divided into train and test sets using 75:25 train to test ratio.
During the learning phase, the linear regression resulted in the
following model parameters:
 Intercept: 1.228 MLS: Minimum Leaf Size
Model co-efficient 1: -0.037 SDS: Surrogate Decision Splits
Model co-efficient 2: -0.013 NL: Number of Learners
Model co-efficient 3: -0.349 LR: Learning Rate
Model co-efficient 4: -0.777
These values were "learned" during the model fitting step As it can be seen from table II, the lowest MAE of 1.586
using the "least squares" criterion. Then, the fitted model was was achieved in the case of Linear SVM with a training time
used to make predictions. One important phase of any of 33.209 seconds. The Cubic SVM took the longest (973.9 s)
machine learning study is to measure the prediction accuracy.
to train with a slightly worse MAE. The quickest algorithm to
Mean squared errors or mean absolute errors are most
train was the Fine Trees but the MAE was the worst.
commonly used in determining such accuracies since their
scale is directly associated with the scale of the data [30]. The
following metrics were considered to measure the accuracy of Multi-Layer Perceptron Feed Forward Artificial Neural
the prediction models: Network: In this case, minimum, maximum and mean MAE
was calculated after 30 runs using the Levenberg-Maquardt
Mean Absolute Error (MAE): MAE is the mean of the algorithm. A 5% randomly selected data were kept for testing
absolute value of the errors given by the following equation: for added experiment robustness. The remaining dataset was
divided into train, validate and test sets with ratios of 70%,
1
| | 15% and 15% respectively. The experiment was repeated for
5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 50 and 100 neurons in the hidden layer.
It was discovered that the lowest MAE of 1.42 was achieved
Mean Squared Error (MSE): MSE is the mean of the
for 20 neurons in the hidden layer.
squared errors given by the following equation:
TABLE III. MAE AFTER 30 RUNS OF MLP
1
Neurons 5 10 15 20 25 30 50 100
Min 1.48 1.45 1.48 1.42 1.49 1.53 1.50 1.50
Max 1.72 1.79 1.80 1.79 1.79 1.80 1.79 2.09
Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE): RMSE is the square Mean 1.60 1.62 1.61 1.59 1.61 1.63 1.62 1.70
root of the mean of the squared errors:
Further simulations were carried out using 20 neurons in
1 the hidden layer and Mean Squared Error as a performance
function. A value of 0.9 for rgularisation was used to avoid
overfitting. This parameter is a fraction between 0 and 1
indicating the proportion of performance attributed to
Using these equations, the following results were
weight/bias values. The larger this value the network will be
obtained:
penalised for large weights, and the more likely the network
MAE: 1.598 function will avoid overfitting. The predicted and actual BMI
MSE: 4.729 values for 100 instances are plotted on the graph. The neural
RMSE: 2.175 net-work was trained using 20 neurons in the hidden layer and
Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. As it can be seen from the
The Mean Absolute Error metric is far more meaningful graph, the predicted values correlate very closely with the
since it relates to the output directly since it is in the same units actual hidden data values.
as the target output. The mean value for the predicted output
is 21.258 which results in a prediction error of 7.52%.
2) Additional regression algorithms:
A number of additional regression algorithms were
employed to evaluate the effectiveness in terms of prediction
accuracy and training time. These included Linear Support
Vector Machines, Quadratic Support Vector Machines,
Actual and predicted BMI

Decision Trees and Ensemble algorithms. The results

obtained are shown in table II:

TABLE II. ADDITIONAL REGRESSION ALGORITHMS

Algorithm RMSE MSE MAE Training
time
Linear SVM 2.262 5.116 1.586 33.21 s
Quadratic SVM 2.230 4.970 1.589 97.15 s
Cubic SVM 2.233 4.986 1.597 973.90 s
Fine Tree MLS=8, NL=30 2.654 7.045 1.982 1.75 s Data instance
Ensemble Bagged Trees 2.172 4.716 1.604 6.92 s
Fig. 1. Predicted and actual BMI values
MLS=8, NL=30
Ensemble Boosted Trees 2.350 5.520 1.712 7.84 s
MLS=8, NL=30, LR=0.1
Ensemble Bagged Trees 2.160 4.663 1.593 7.53 s
MLS=15, NL=50

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 IV. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER WORK
In this paper we have experimented with various
multivariate regression algorithms and multi-layer perceptron
feed forward artificial neural networks (MLPFFANN). The
results obtained indicate that the MLPFFANN algorithm
using 20 neurons in the hidden layer results in the lowest
mean absolute error after taking average of 30 runs. The data
was randomized for each run and the neural network was
initialized with new random parameters. Additional
regression algorithms were also tried, however,
implementing a complex algorithm didn’t achieve any better
results. Some of these complex algorithms took a lot longer
to train but the mean absolute error didn’t improve. The best
prediction accuracy based on a MAE of 1.42 in the case of
MLPFFANN equates to an accuracy of 93.4%. This is very
encouraging, but more work needs to be done to ensure the
robustness of the prediction network. Further work is
proposed to be done by employing additional hidden layers
to create a deeper network. Increasing the size of dataset may
also result in higher accuracies. This can be done by
implementing multiple imputations to salvage the data
samples which were originally discarded because of the
presence of outliers.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors are grateful to ‘The Centre for Longitudinal
Studies, Institute of Education’ for the use of data used in
this study and to the ‘UK Data Archive Service’ for making
them available. However, they are in no way responsible for
the analysis and interpretation of these data.
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