Interpretable Models for ML-Based Classification of Obesity.

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the healthcare business, thanks to the rising availability of structured and unstructured data and the rapid advancement of analytical methodologies. With artificial intelligence's expanding importance in healthcare, there are growing issues about a lack of transparency and explainability, as well as potential bias in model predictions. The goal of this paper is to use interpretable ML to provide a better understanding of the lifestyle factors that influence the model's predictions of the weight levels, as well as to identify the most critical features for the classification task. We aim to create more accurate and effective predictive models for weight management, which could eventually help individuals make more informed decisions about their diet and lifestyle choices. Our machine learning model got an accuracy of 76% using XG-boost and Random Forest and we tried to interpret the result using a model-agnostic method including, the permutation importance method and partial dependence plot. The results showed that the number of main meals, frequent consumption of vegetables, and time using technology are the most important features. Further explanation was performed using a partial dependence plot which interprets the relationship between these important features and the model behavior.